Elsa Kugelberg
6 min
Political philosophy has extensively analyzed the digital public sphere, but the 'digital sexual sphere'—the online ecosystem where individuals interact with potential sexual partners—remains under-theorized. Dating apps have become a primary avenue for meeting partners, effectively intervening in the social institution of dating. Because this institution is vital for social reproduction and care work, the corporations that control these platforms wield immense power over individuals' lives. This paper provides a normative framework to evaluate whether this power is exercised in line with individuals' interests.
Drawing on liberal egalitarian theory, the author argues that individuals have three fundamental claims against the institutions that govern their intimate lives:
Dating apps are evaluated based on how their architecture, moderation, and amplification algorithms impact these three claims. While apps offer solutions to traditional problems—such as the difficulty of finding partners in small communities—they often do so in ways that prioritize data extraction and profit over the realization of these claims.
Apps exercise power through three primary mechanisms:
This research demonstrates that dating apps are not neutral intermediaries but active participants in shaping social norms and intimate possibilities. By identifying the specific ways these platforms fail to uphold claims of justice, the paper provides a basis for demanding greater transparency, better moderation, and more equitable design, ultimately arguing that the current 'laissez-faire' approach to dating app regulation is insufficient.
The online dating application has in recent years become a major avenue for meeting potential partners. However, while the digital public sphere has gained the attention of political philosophers, a systematic normative evaluation of issues arising in the “digital sexual sphere” is lacking. I provide a philosophical framework for assessing the conduct of dating app corporations, capturing both the motivations of users, and the reason why they find usage unsatisfying. Identifying dating apps as agents intervening in a social institution necessary for the reproduction of society, with immense power over people’s lives, I ask if they exercise their power in line with individuals’ interests. Acknowledging that people have claims to noninterference, equal standing, and choice improvement relating to intimacy, I find that the traditional, nondigital, sexual sphere poses problems to their realisation, especially for sexual minorities. In this context, apps’ potential for justice in the sexual sphere is immense but unfulfilled.
Alex: So the equal standing claim is being violated not by any single decision, but by the structural logic of how the system optimizes.
Sam: Right. And that's what makes this a governance problem rather than a consumer protection problem. If a shop overcharges you, you can go elsewhere. But if the dominant platforms all use similar optimization logics — and they do, because they're all chasing engagement and retention — then exit isn't a meaningful remedy. Kugelberg's point is that when a private system becomes the primary infrastructure for a fundamental social good, the usual market logic stops being sufficient justification for how it operates.
Alex: Where does the framework run into trouble?
Sam: The most significant limitation she acknowledges is that the digital sphere is downstream from a broken political economy. A dating app that perfectly satisfied all three claims — full transparency, equal algorithmic treatment, robust noninterference — would still be operating in a society with deep structural inequalities around race, class, disability, and gender. The app can't fix those. So there's a real question about how much normative weight this framework can carry on its own, and Kugelberg is careful not to oversell it. She's not claiming these platforms are the root cause of inequality in intimate life. The claim is narrower and, I think, more defensible: that they are currently exacerbating those inequalities by operating without any public accountability, and that the philosophical tools exist to demand better.
Alex: Which raises an obvious implementation question — who does the demanding? Regulation, platform self-governance, something else?
Sam: She doesn't resolve that, and I think that's a genuine gap in the paper. The normative framework is well-constructed, but the institutional pathway from "these platforms have obligations" to "these platforms are held to those obligations" is largely left open. That's the work a follow-up paper needs to do. What she does establish — and this is the contribution worth taking seriously — is that the conversation needs to shift. We've been debating dating apps as consumer products with privacy issues. Kugelberg is arguing they should be debated as governance structures with justice implications. That's a meaningful reframe, and it opens up a different set of policy and design questions than the ones currently on the table.
Alex: It also suggests that researchers working on algorithmic fairness in adjacent domains — hiring, lending, housing — have a ready-made set of tools that haven't really been applied here yet.
Sam: That's a productive read of it. The fairness literature has well-developed methods for auditing ranking systems and measuring disparate impact. Applying that apparatus to dating platforms is a tractable empirical project that this theoretical work arguably motivates. Whether platforms would cooperate with that kind of audit is a separate question, but the normative case for why they should is what Kugelberg is building.
Alex: A useful provocation, then, with the implementation left as an exercise for the reader — or the regulator. Thanks for walking through it. And thanks to everyone listening to ResearchPod.