Characterizing user behaviors in location-based find-and-flirt services: Anonymity and demographics

Hooking up with friends: LGBTQ+ young people, dating apps, friendship and safety

“…Given the app’s multiple orientations, Chan (2019) suggests that the brand’s promise of being a ‘platform for “everything”’ may well be accurate (p. 12). Alongside research on Momo is broader literature on how the use of social media such as LINE (Cassidy and Wang, 2018) and WeChat (Xue et al, 2016) overlap with hook-up apps – for example, WeChat’s ‘people nearby’ function affords the potential for hooking up with strangers (Xue et al, 2016). These examples highlight a need for hook-up app researchers to expand our understanding of dating/hook-up app practices beyond specific apps and consider how a range of connections are forged through a multitude of platforms – generating connections based on sex, friendship, or indeed both.…”

Gender and the privacy paradox in Chinese college students’ locative dating communication

“…These young people's gendered navigation of the privacy paradox is, thus, part of the socio-technological process through which existing gender power relations are reproduced in their locative dating encounters. A pioneering study by Xue et al (2017) has touched upon the gendered dimensions of users' privacy management strategies on locative dating applications. Their analysis of 3215 WeChat People Nearby users shows that significantly fewer women than men are using this function, because men are 'less privacy concerned' and 'more aggressive' when using People Nearby 'to establish new friends and mates' (Xue et al, 2017, p. 361).…”

“…WeChat is the most popular Chinese social media application, adopted by over 1 billion users worldwide (Tencent, 2019). This application has a locative dating function, People Nearby, which enables users to access a list displaying the profiles of fellow users whose locations are proximate to their own (Xue et al, 2017). Often, moving away from home to study in a different city, Chinese college students are distanced from their social networks developed in their hometowns.…”

A deep dive into location-based communities in social discovery networks

“…Sweetr [9] has similar features with Momo and allows to discover nearby users and share content such as text, photos, audio, and video with them. Two popular social networks Facebook and WeChat have LBSN features named as Near By Friends [11] and People Nearby [13], respectively. In general, LBSDs target applications such as dating, find people with similar interests, discuss or spread locally important news items, content sharing or game play with nearby users, and providing more personalised recommendations.…”

“…We also note that [14] studied the Momo network before the community membership feature of the system was introduced. Xue et al [13] study the behaviour of the WeChat users who are using the People Nearby feature in terms of anonymity and demographics and show that users tend to be anonymous when using LBSNs and more male users tend to use LBSN services compared to female users. In another work, Xue et al [38] highlight the inherent privacy risks associated with LBSNs that share users location as bands with other users and propose counter measures to alleviate this problem.…”