A third of Tinder users are married? Hell no, says Tinder

If you managed to miss it, a widely covered new survey claims to show that Tinder users are wildly dishonest (even for Tinder users). Thirty percent of users are married, according to the survey, and an additional 12 percent are in a relationship.

Those numbers suggest that either a ton of people are on the dating app for s**ts and giggles (possible) or a ton of people are big fat cheaters (also possible).

Too bad Tinder says the survey is total crap.

“The results of the study are inaccurate and completely non-descriptive of Tinder’s user base,” said Rosette Pambakian, Tinder’s vice president of communications and branding, in an email to Fusion.

Who to believe? Let’s talk about that survey (which media, of course, went nuts over). It was conducted by Global Web Index, a company based in the U.K., and interviewed 47,622 Internet users ages 16 to 64 across 33 countries. Sounds legit so far.

The thing is, it turns out only 621 of those users were actually on Tinder. And of those 621 swipers, 30 percent were married, 12 percent were in a relationship, and only 54 percent were single.

Since the survey’s original sample size—Internet users aged 16 to 64—didn’t fall into Tinder’s key demographic, Tinder says its results hold no weight.

“More than 50 percent of our users are age 18 to 24. Another 35 percent are age 24 to 34,” said Pambakian. “So their methodology seems severely flawed—a small, random sampling is not an accurate depiction of the millions of users we have around the world.”

In other words, the results mean a bunch of people who don’t use Tinder were surveyed—and of the outliers who did, only half were on the app to actually date. Also, it’s unclear which of the 33 countries those outliers represented. (Tinder in India may be used differently than in the U.S.).

While it’s painful to back up Tinder (because: Tinder)—and while the survey’s findings can’t be totally disregarded—it’s unfair to say most of its users are cheaters or liars based on a teeny, tiny survey that, frankly, didn’t target their users to begin with.

Tinder adds, “The hundreds of success stories we receive each week about Tinder marriages and engagements tells us that Tinder is helping singles find love.” Uh huh.

Taryn Hillin is Fusion’s love and sex writer, with a large focus on the science of relationships. She also loves dogs, Bourbon barrel-aged beers and popcorn — not necessarily in that order.