[somehnacct3757]

Rather than swallow the headline, ask yourself what a church-aligned think tank has to gain out of smearing online dating in the press?

Some of their other research: "Rock and rollers twice as likely to divorce" https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/research/rock-n-rollers-tw...

Hopefully next they will look into the impact the Devil's Lettuce has on marriage; or Harry Potter.

[jasmer]

Or ask yourself how cynical your own line of inquisition is?

Yes, church groups are probably going to be a bit more 'pro-marriage' than some others. I guess the 'anti-marriage' people?

And?

Everything in the press is presented by someone with some perspective they want to highlight.

And the link you referred us to states probably what to most of us a bit obvious - that celebrities divorce more often - but which is thoughtful to have in numbers.

And?

So, what specifically is wrong with the study in question?

Because I think it seems helpful.

I buy that online dating may not be quite as effective at forming 'long term relationships' as otherwise, and that it might be worth looking at in more detail. It could maybe be a matter of 'distance relationships'. Or possibly those individuals may have been less likely to be married in the first place?

I'll wager 5x more people are going to be interested in this issue than 'crypto currency' for example.

[somehnacct3757]

It's a group that took statistics from Wikipedia articles of famous people to then run the headline "rock and rollers twice as likely to divorce." That headline is misleading. They didn't study rock and rollers, they studied celebrities.

This older survey similarly has them playing fast and loose with the statistics to get a flashy headline. In their own data it's clear that online dating has cannibalized dating at bars, and shares a near identical divorce rate - 20% vs 19%. In other words the survey is a nothingburger. All it shows is a shift in dating channels. But that's not the headline they pushed.

If their clickbait strategy isn't clear to you yet, don't take it from me. They claim this is their goal on their own website: "Time and again our research department has injected reality and hard evidence into this debate with eye catching research which the media have broadcast."

[jasmer]

The headline 'couples meet xxx ...' is absolutely not 'clickbait' moreover, the notion that 'bar dating' and 'online dating' might have some similarities is reasonable, but beyond requirement to include in a report a few sentences long especially given that it's nuanced.

Since most, even 'respected' journalism is a bit clickbaity, this is well within normative editorialization.

Hence the likely bigotry on the part of people ventilating about the origin of the data.