By: Michael Chaar / COMS 427
The social media platform in which I will be discussing throughout this paper is the notoriously used gay dating application, Grindr. The app first launched on March 25, 2009, and is declared as the “largest social networking app for gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people” (Grindr). The application itself is widely known and used as a dating app; however, it falls under a more specific category of networks known as “geosocial networking”. These networking tools allow users to benefit from its “geographical services and capabilities such as geocoding and geotagging”, which enables social dynamics and allows users to locate others close by (Grindr). In this case, the application allows users to seek out sexual partners, casual hook-ups or friends through the use of location services, much like many other dating applications on the market, including Tinder and Bumble.
The app was founded by Joel Simkhai in Los Angeles, California, and is readily available for download from the Apple App Store and Google Play, meaning it can be used on both iOS and Android devices. While the device may no longer be as popular as it once was, Grindr was also made available on Blackberry phones as of March 2010 in celebration of its one-year anniversary. Grindr was the first and only gay dating app to be available in the iTunes App Store during its time and is currently available in 192 countries. The app has made its way through a multitude of companies, first selling 60% of its stakes back in 2016 to a Chinese gaming company, Beijing Kunlun Tech, for a whopping $93 million. Kunlun Tech later purchased the remaining 40% of the company for another $152 million (Wang, 2019).
Grindr offers users three different versions of the application. The basic and free subscription allows users to be able to view up to 100 profiles of nearby people. The profiles display a display photo, the person’s name or alias, age, activity and distance. In addition, a brief description can be utilized in order to say something about yourself. Other features that can be posted to one’s profile include height, weight, sexual position, relationship status, HIV status and links to users’ other social media profiles such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. While the free version of the app can pose its limitations in regards to how many people you can view, there are two other paid versions: Grindr Lite and Grindr XTRA. According to Grindr’s website, their Lite version is described as “the premium version of the app that is offered as a 1-month auto-renew subscription”. This version allows users to view up to 300 people and eliminate banner ads. Grindr XTRA is the unlimited version of the app that allows users to view up to 600 people, no banner ads, personalized push notifications, read receipts, phone and video call features, a discreet app icon, unlimited blocks and favourites and a plethora of additional filters. The cost for the two premium versions of the app can cost as low as $2.99 per month up to $60 per month depending on period plans.
Grindr has become quite a hot topic in regard to its positive and negative implications surrounding its use. Grindr has attributed to the formation of social groups and has promoted and encouraged socialization amongst its users. While appearing as a simple dating application, Grindr has also succumbed to very harsh stereotypes and filtering methods when swiping through profiles and has become tied into unethical practices regarding surveillance and data selling.
If there is any good to come out of Grindr, other than the formation of potential long-term relationships, it is the fact that the application promotes and encourages homosocialization. Similarly to standard socialization, homosocialization is described by Art & Pop Culture, as “the process by which LGBT people meet, relate and become integrated into the LGBT community, especially with people of the same sexual orientation and gender identity, helping to build their own identity as well”. In this instance, the application can aid certain users looking to find others who they can identify with on levels that are not readily available in other online or real-life settings. As described on Grindr’s website, the app is a completely safe space where users can “discover, navigate, and get zero feet away from the queer world around you” (Grindr).
While this all sounds great, the app itself has turned into quite a dangerous environment for the LGBT community. Despite the app promoting a “safe space”, stereotypes and unhealthy swiping methods have led to a number of negative effects. For example, “no fats, fems or Asians” is one of the most commonly used descriptions for many users. In this case, users who use this phrase have no interest in meeting or getting to know anyone who is overweight, feminine or Asian, which only adds an enormous amount of salt to the already massive wound the LGBT community faces. Much like these hurtful comments, there is little to no monitoring when it comes to the language used on the application. Grindr users are free to post offensive language (i.e.: racist, homophobic) with little to no consequences. As discussed in class, there are many online social platforms (Club Penguin, Twitter, Instagram), that flags offensive speech and suspends users account for an indefinite period of time, however, Grindr does not apply these types of guidelines when it comes to what users can and cannot post, comment or say throughout the app. While these negative implications surrounding the app cause a few red flags to appear, it is the combination of triangulation capabilities and data management that put certain users at serious risk.
One major issue surrounding Grindr is the fact that users’ data can easily be accessed and used in ways that they might not be totally aware of. In Dijck’s ‘The Platform Society’, he describes this method as datafication, which many social media platforms perform. In this case, platforms “systematically collect and analyze user data; they also constantly circulate these data through API’s to third parties” (Dijck, 2018), which in turn can be used for “targeted advertising and services” as Dijck mentions (2018). As previously mentioned, Grindr does include ad banners on the free version, which utilized users’ data in order to target specific ads that will appeal to its free users. While this may be a common practice, things took a nasty turn for the app when it was confirmed that Grindr was revealing users’ HIV statuses to outside vendors. According to Natasha Singer of the ‘New York Times’, Grindr was “sharing users HIV status, sexual tastes and other intimate personal details with outside software vendors” (2018). The discovery was made by a Norwegian non-profit organization called SINTEF in April 2018 and reported the unethical release of users’ personal information. Luckily for Grindr users, the company has now confirmed that this practice is no longer in effect and should not be a concern for its users any longer (Singer, 2018). This is a huge deal in regard to users’ safety and status, especially if people are using this application in a discreet manner.
This then ties into the aspect of surveillance, and how governments have used Grindr’s location services across the globe in order to capture closeted gay men in more conservative countries such as Egypt. In Zeynep Tufecki’s piece ‘Engineering The Public’, he discusses how such triangulation capabilities on social platforms “operate by making surveillance as implicit, hidden and invisible as possible, without an observed person being aware of it” (2014). In this case, the location services utilized on Grindr may be public knowledge, however, the depth of its use is certainly not realized by many of the application’s users. When it comes to surveillance and censorship, the app does not protect discreet users from being outed or discovered by country officials. For example, Egyptian police are using Grindr and other dating apps to arrest LGBTQ+ citizens. According to Leyal Khalife of Step Feed, Egyptian authorities are posing as gay men on the app in order to entrap users and imprison them based on their sexual orientation (2017). While Grindr has released a message to its Egyptian users in order to warn them of such unethical government practices, this has not stopped the arrests of countless men from occurring.
As discussed, the app does offer users a sense of community, however, with a number of negative implications from offensive speech, data breaching and the unethical use of location services, Grindr has a lot of work to do in order to create the true “safe space” that they offer its LGBTQ+ users.
Bibliography:
Dijck, Poelle & Waal (2018). “The Platform Society: Public Values In A Connective World”. New York. Oxford University Press. pp. 33
Grindr. About Page.
Khalife, Leyal (2017). “Egyptian Police Are Using Grindr & Other Dating Apps To Arrest Gay Men. Step Feed.
Singer, Natasha (2018). “Grindr Sets Off Privacy Firestorm After Sharing Users’ HIV Status Data”. The New York Times.
The Art & Pop Culture Encyclopaedia – “Homosocialization”.
Tufekci, Zeynep (2014). “Engineering The Public: Big Data, Surveillance & Computational Politics”.
Wang, Echo (2019). “China’s Kunlun Tech Agrees To U.S Demand To Seel Grindr Gay Dating App”. Reuters.
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