Selling visibility-boosts on dating apps: a problematic practice?

Love, sex, and physical intimacy are some of the most desired goods in life and they are increasingly being sought on dating apps such as Tinder, Bumble, and Badoo. For those who want a leg up in the chase for other people’s attention, almost all of these apps now offer the option of paying a fee to boost one’s visibility for a certain amount of time, which may range from 30 min to a few hours. In this article, I argue that there are strong moral grounds and, in countries with laws against unconscionable contracts, legal ones for thinking that the sale of such visibility boosts should be regulated, if not banned altogether. To do so, I raise two objections against their unfettered sale, namely that it exploits the impaired autonomy of certain users and that it creates socio-economic injustices.