Ahead of the official launch of the British reality series “Love Island,” producers revealed that they had resorted to a new way of finding contestants. To pick out new islanders with fresh faces they turned to the dating app Tinder, apart from searching for new faces in clubs, approaching famous party girls and boys, as well as reviewing applications, as The Sun newspaper reports.
According to the media outlet, only 45 people had been picked from over 100,000 applications.
The BAFTA-winning dating reality series, “Love Island,” isolates contestants from the world in a villa in Mallorca, Spain, where each of them is to couple with another participant in hopes of ultimately winning a money prize. Those who fail to find a match have to leave.
Launched in 2012, Tinder has become one of the most popular smartphone dating apps. With people under 35 comprising its core audience, the total number of Tinder members hit 46 million people in 2017.
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However, Tinder has notoriously been viewed as an app for hookups, raising morality concerns. For example, the Texas Tech Department of Communications Studies conducted a study in 2017 showing that “more than half reported having seen somebody on Tinder who they knew was in an exclusive relationship (63.9%).”