About 24 hours after joining Tinder, Ashley Brincefield, 31, a customs inspector in Port Tobacco, Md., began getting creepy messages. Married men propositioned her for sex. Guys lashed out if they didn’t get a reply in a timely fashion. Various men sent naked selfies.
Ms. Brincefield tried blocking them and reporting them to Tinder, but the harassers would just surface under a new screen name, she said. So she decided to take matters into her own hands.
She took screen shots of the offending messages, superimposed them with remarks like “Tinder is not the solution to your marital problems” and uploaded them to her profile as a warning to future matches.
“Don’t mess with me,” Ms. Brincefield said. “I am going to shame them if they send an obnoxious message.”
Some cybervigilantes are going a step further.
Alexandra Tweten, 27, an operations coordinator for Live Nation in Los Angeles, received abusive messages from men on OKCupid and other sites. So in October, she started compiling them on her Instagram account, Bye Felipe. (The name is based on the urban slang term “Bye Felicia,” which is used to dismiss someone insignificant.)
Soon after, she invited other women to submit screen shots to call out “dudes who turn hostile when rejected or ignored.” Bye Felipe currently has 318,000 followers and 4,000 submissions, including text messages that quickly devolve into misogynistic outbursts, explicit photographs and tirades like, “You deserve something worse than death.”
A similar project called Instagranniepants was created by Anna Gensler, 25, an illustrator in Baltimore. She takes the harassing messages she gets on OKCupid, and draws cartoons of the men and their messages.
Harassment on dating apps is a common problem. According to a Pew Research Center study in 2013, 28 percent of online daters reported feeling harassed, with more female online daters (42 percent) saying they had experienced harassment than male online daters (17 percent).
Dating sites like OKCupid and Tinder are aware of the harassment that women face, and are trying to minimize it. In March, Tinder announced changes to its service to encourage users to report bad behavior.
“We’ve always taken complaints from our users very seriously and promptly delete profiles that are hurting the ecosystem,“ said Rosette Pambakian, a spokeswoman for Tinder.
Nevertheless, enforcement is a problem. “We can ban IP addresses, but ultimately you can just sign up another account,” said Mike Maxim, the chief technology officer of OKCupid, which is experimenting with algorithms that flag harassers.
Women like Ms. Brincefield say they are making headway with their own initiatives.
Ms. Brincefield said the inappropriate messages she now receives on Tinder are “few and far between.” She even attracts men who applaud her efforts. “It allows me to see who the good guys are,” she said.
Among them is Rick Mayo, 33, a manager of a condominium development in Rosslyn, Va., who spotted Ms. Brincefield’s Tinder profile in October. “My first reaction was, this girl’s hilarious,” Mr. Mayo said. “It made me want to talk to her more to pick her brains.”
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