Fabian Carstairs has narrated this article for you to listen to.
There’s a online blacklist of men you should avoid dating and I’m on it. I discovered this over the summer when a colleague gave me a nudge and showed me a screenshot of my dating profile. ‘That’s you, isn’t it?’ A wave of fear passed through me. I had been posted on a Facebook group named ‘Are we dating the same guy?’. I set out to discover more.
The group itself was easy enough to find. It was started in New York last year to help the city’s single women avoid ‘red flag’ men. The group describes itself as a place where women can ‘warn other women about liars, cheaters, abusers, or anyone who exhibits any type of toxic or dangerous behaviour’. Now it has more than two million members from 120 cities across the world. The London group has nearly 73,000 members.
Joining the group was going to be less easy: for starters, you have to be female. To gain access, members have to go through a rigorous and tightly controlled screening process. Applicants must regurgitate, ‘in their own words’, the group’s 900-word rules-cum-manifesto. No men, no sharing outside the group. Moderators do reverse-image searches of profile pictures to catch fake accounts. There’s more than a hint of paranoia: you’ll be banned if you ‘mention this group or the existence of groups like this on social media, on a podcast, on the radio, to the media, or anywhere else public’.
A friend kindly lent me her Facebook account and I passed the application. Inside, there’s a general format to the posts. Someone will post pictures of a guy and ask the crowd if there is any gossip about him.
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