Chad Franklin is the kind of content creator who makes you scroll faster, but you never quite forget him. A 30-year-old dating coach with 512,000 TikTok followers, he has built a career on the raw, awkward, and occasionally brutal edges of modern romance. His clients pay upwards of $5,000 for his services, and in exchange, they sometimes find themselves turned into content. Franklin has made it his mission to help straight, career-driven men in their “post-breakup, post-divorce” era undo their so-called “simp” behavior—a term he uses for men who put women on pedestals, shower them with too much attention, or lose themselves in pursuit of approval. But in practice,that mission has often meant sharing private messages these clients receive, and posting them to a massive audience with a mixture of mockery, male bonding, and genuine belief that he is doing the right thing. When I reached out to him recently, I wanted to talk about a different topic: Hinge had just begun testing screenshot protection in India, a move that set off a firestorm of reaction across social media. Yet it was impossible to sit with Franklin for long without confronting the uncomfortable truthat his entire online persona depends on the exact behavior that protection would make harder. His videos are a strange hybrid of confession, coaching, andpublic dissection—and they raise an uncomfortable question: in the age of viral screenshotting, where doeshelp end andhumiliation begin?
In September, Franklin shared a DM conversation in which a woman implied she couldn’t afford an Uber. The text overlay was blunt and merciless: “Don’t date POOR women!!!” The video clearly stung—not because it was staged, but because it felt familiar to anyone who has ever tried to navigate the silent arithmetic of attraction and money. Later that month, he uploaded a video of a client’s successful text exchange on Hinge, in which the woman suggested they should“flirt over some margaritas.” Franklin could barely contain himself. In the clip, he pointed to the exchange as exactly the kind of tête-à-tête that gets his “dick hard”—a phrase he delivered with the unapologetic energy of a locker room pep talk. “This is what men are looking for. We lead, you follow,” he said, as if he had just uncovered the secret geometry of desire. The video was widely shared, but it also underlined a defining tension in Franklin’s world: he genuinely believes he is saving men from being taken advantage of, while simultaneously building a following off moments that the women involved almost certainly never expected to be broadcast. Franklin posts under the alias @DefundSimping, and his content is designed to feel like a revolution against a culture that, in his view, has told men they should be endlessly giving, endlessly patient, and endlessly emotionally available—while women, he argues, are often free totake that generosity without consequence.
Franklin’s philosophy is not subtle. He sees modern dating as a power struggle, a game of status, scarcity, and self-respect. His videos frequently hammer home the idea that a man’s most valuable asset is his ability to lead,to set boundaries,to walk away. He warns against over-investing early, against chasing women who make little effort, against mistaking paid attention for genuine interest. To his followers, this message feels like a lifeline,especially for men emerge from a divorce or a brutal breakup only to discover that the rules of dating have shifted beneath them. They are often lonely, defensive, and desperate for a framework that promises to keep them from getting hurt again. Franklin gives them that framework—along with simple, memorable rules that can feel like armor. “Everyone who’s downloaded the app has seen the debauchery and the drama,” he told me, explaining that being online in 2026 simply means there is a chance you will become the day’s main character whether you intended to or not. “People are aware that they could be the next haha moment, but that doesn’t mean they deserve it.” There is something unexpectedly human in that last sentence. For all his bluster, Franklin knows what it is like to be watched, to be judged, to be reduced to a screenshot and a punchline. He has built himself as the antidote to that vulnerability, offering his followers a way to reclaim power in a world that often makes men feel expendable. But he has also become a participant in that machinery, and his willingness to share his clients’ private conversations suggests that the line between empowerment andexploitation is thinner than he pretends.
The broader ecosystem that surrounds Franklin is just as strange. TikTokers, X accounts like @hingestrange, and countless other creators have built entire brands out of screenshotting and sharing bizarre dating profile prompts, cringe pickup lines, red flags, and outright disasters found while swiping. It has become a genre of its own: a weird blend of anthropology, entertainment, andpublic shaming. Some of these accounts are relatively benign—people sharing a wildly inappropriate opening message or an impossibly pretentious bio with a laugh. But others dive into deeply personal exchanges, exposing someone’s insecurities, trauma, or awkward attempts atconnection to hundreds of thousands of strangers. The people in those screenshots rarely have a chance to explain, to apologize, or to defend themselves. They simply become content. Critics of the trend have grown louder in recent years, arguing that this constant spectatorial cruelty is a form of public humiliation that should end. Every swipe carries a small risk that your face, your words, your loneliness will end up immortalized next to a mocking caption. And because dating apps are intimate by design, theing danger malfeasance frustration is its violation. Franklin, despite his own participation in this culture, understands the worry: he knows that his followers’ screenshots andhilarious DMs are often, at bottom, moments of genuine vulnerability. He wants to help his clients avoid being the butt of joke, but his method often involves making others exactly that. It is a strange loop—one that the dating app Hinge finally decided to disrupt, at least in one corner of the world.
When news broke that Hinge was testing screenshot protection in India, the internet reacted the way it always does—with a thousand hot takes, gallons of righteous anger, and plenty of confusion. On one level, the feature seemed simple: it would prevent users from taking screenshots of profiles or conversations, at least in certain contexts. But underneath the mechanics lay a much bigger question: should anyone be allowed to capture and broadcast a private dating interaction without consent? The responses split sharply. Jaded daters, exhausted by beholding their worst moments turned into viral content, expressed deep relief. Writer Tres Dean captured that feeling on X with a line that felt like a benediction: “People on here kinda turned being on a dating app into both an extension of the panopticon and a window into their own personal penchant for cruelty. I actually think this might be the first ethical development in online dating in years if not ever.” The reference to the panopticon weredeliberately bleak.,but it caught something real: dating apps already make us feel perpetually watched, assessed, andranked, and screenshotting turns that ambient surveillance into a permanent, shareable record. A stupid pickup line, a typo, an awkward confession can follow you forever. Dean’s point was not that bad behavior should go unpunished, but that the punishment dynamic had grown grotesquely out of proportion. The desire to expose, mock, andembarrass had become so normal that people forgot there was a real human beingon the other side of the screen, often just as nervous, just as hopeful, just as fragile as everyone else.
Still, others saw the feature as a troubling erosion of accountability. Screenshots have long been the way women document harassment, warn each other about dangerous men, and provewhat happened when the romanticized version of events doesn’t match reality. Removing isn’t exactly taking away accountability, though—it’s taking away the ability to easily broadcast someone else’s words without their knowledge. There is a world of difference between sharing a threat with a friend or authorities and posting a woman’s name, face, and awkward text exchange to half a million strangers. Another X user, @randy_mossad, put the moral calculus into words that stumbled toward a definition of decency:“Better for a million cheaters to go unpunished than for one regular person looking for love to get humiliated by leaked chats.” That sentence is not absolute purity—it is a wager, an acknowledgment that privacy, trust, androom to fumble quietly matter more than our collective schadenfreude. It is also a reminder of what type of online life is actually possible if we stopped treating everyone we meet as potential content. The people who appear in those supposed “haha moment” posts are not villains. They are people who put themselves out there, sometimes clumsily, sometimes desperately, sometimes with real hope—and that effort alone should not make them cannon fodder for an engagement farm.
What does all this mean for the wider culture of dating inin 2026? Perhaps it means we are at areckoning point, unable to decide whether courtship is a private act or a public spectacle. The rise of dating coaches like Franklin is a symptom of a world hungry for certainty insomething deeply uncertain. He sells clarity: good women do this, bad women do that, real men act this way,and if you follow the rules, you won’t be humiliated. But love has never been that neat. It is messy, irrational, and always risks betrayal, embarrassment, failure. The impulse to hand over our privacy in exchange for safety—or at least the illusion of safety—is understandable, but it comes at a cost. When every interaction is potentially public, people become more guarded, less honest, less willing to take the leaps that romance requires. They lie, they perform, they seek validation not from the person opposite them but from the imagined audience watching over their shoulder. That is not a recipe for connection; itis a recipe for loneliness. Franklin’s content, for all its vulgarity, taps into a real grief: men who feel they have been unseen, undervalued, and treated replaceably. His answer is to make them less vulnerable, more in control, more willing to lead. But the vulnerability was never the problem. The problem is a culture that makes vulnerability shameful; one that teaches us the only way to openyour heart safely is to first destroy someone else’s.
Maybe, then, the most radical thing Hinge could do is not to take away screenshots entirely, but to remind us that behind every profile is a complicated, flawed, hopeful person. Screenshot protection in India is a small test, not a revolution. But it points toward a possible future where dating apps could prioritize trust over virality, privacy over performance. The longing underneath all the outrage—from Franklin’s clients, from his critics, from the people whose DMs get shared without permission—is the same. Everyone wants to be seen, understood, andnot humiliated for trying. The people on dating apps are not content; they are humans stumbling toward connection in an era that layers Feudalism of attention atop the tenderest portions of their hearts. If we could hold on to that, even briefly, we might scroll less, breathe more, andremember that the right to fumble privately is one of the quietest kindnesses we can offer each other. The next time you see a screenshot that makes you laugh, it might be worth pausingto ask: who had to be embarrassed so I could feel entertained? And whether the answer changes what you do—not just online, but in the actual relationships you are building, one imperfect, humanizing conversation at a time.
