Now, the company is making it clear that there is no place for body shame of any kind on its platform.
“Find something more about their profile to talk to. Or, if you’re not interested in someone, you can swipe left,” the company said in a blog this week. “If you’re not sure whether a message is going to look shameful, a good rule of thumb is simply not to comment on another user’s body or health.”
Bumble updated its terms and conditions this week to explicitly list “physical appearance” among other discriminatory languages that it does not tolerate. The list also includes “race, color, ethnicity, nationality, religion, disability, sexual orientation, gender expression, gender identity”.
The updated policy comes at a time when Bumble intends to make its debut on Wall Street. The company filed the paperwork earlier this month for an initial public offering. According to the lawsuit, the Bumble dating empire had 42.1 million monthly active users at the end of September.
In this week’s blog, the company said that shaming the body could mean projecting an opinion on what a “good body” is in a platform biography, or critically commenting on someone’s body or health in a direct message to someone.
“Shaming the body includes shame about fat, shame about health, criticizing skin or hair, shame about thinness, unsolicited opinions and mocking someone’s physical characteristics,” the company said on the blog.
However, as other technology platforms have discovered, defining a new policy is one thing, but applying it can be more challenging. The company said it uses automated safeguards to detect comments and images it prohibits, and it also depends on people who report individuals out of body shame. Individuals will receive a warning and “repeated incidents or particularly damaging comments will result in the platform being banned”.
The policy of shaming the body is just the latest way that Bumble and its founder, Whitney Wolfe Herd, aimed to differentiate the company as a platform geared towards women. The company once criticized and publicly blocked a misogynist user and has a policy that signals obscene images sent via direct messages in its application.
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