First off, let’s be clear on this: No, exiled NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden isn’t actually on Tinder. But if you’ve ever wondered what might happen if Snowden was on Tinder, good news! Someone took it upon themselves to figure out exactly that. The Daily Dot gets credit for pointing it out first; just in case you’re curious, though, here’s how it went down. I mean, really. It’s too good not to write about.
Redditor rosscohen23 posted an Imgur album to the r/funny subreddit yesterday under a thread titled, “I set up a Tinder account for Edward Snowden, these are my favorite interactions with the matches so far.” Ostensibly the whole thing was meant to be a social experiment—but let’s face it: A lot of it was also probably for the humor value. After giving him the screen name “lonely_ed” and a bio stating simply, “Good with computers. Optimist. Loves to travel” (har har), rosscohen23’s fake Snowden was off — and the responses so far have been as varied as they are hilarious. Some of the users who swiped right had plainly been keeping up on the whole story, like Caitlin:
And Glory:
While others seemed not to be familiar with the Snowden saga, like Cheryl:
To be fair, it looks like rosscohen23 set his fake Snowden’s location as Moscow; in spite of the fact that that’s where the real Snowden is believed to have been since the U.S. revoked his passport, Russians are probably less likely to be up-to-date on — or even interested in — the situation. Regardless, though, “Snowden’s” replies to his matches are spot-on; points to rosscohen23 for his level of commitment to the experiment.
Of course, it’s a little unclear about whether any of the people who got the joke in the first place were actually aware that they weren’t conversing with the real Snowden. I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt; presumably if they were with it enough to know the reference, they’d also probably know that Snowden himself would be unlikely to put himself forward on apps like Tinder (it kind of defeats the whole purpose of going underground in the first place). Besides, Caitlin actually surfaced on reddit herself in a few comments that made it obvious she knew what was up:
So, y’know, well done there.
Meanwhile, the real Snowden's one-year permit to stay in Russia is set to end at the end of July; according to lawyer Anatoly Kucherena, he's just applied to extend his stay.
Here’s the full album; it’s definitely worth a few moments of your time:
