To pledge support for the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement, gay dating app, Grindr announced that it will remove the ethnicity filter from the next release. Grindr made the announcement on their official Instagram page on the first day of PRIDE. The ethnicity filter on the app is a feature exclusive to premium subscribers and allows users to choose the race of other users suggested to them. In the statement, the company said, “We will continue to fight racism and hate speech on our platform. As part of this commitment, and based on your feedback, we have decided to remove the ethnicity filter from our next release,” the statement added.
In the past, Grindr’s representatives had defended the ethnicity filter citing minority users who want to find others like themselves as a good use of the feature. “We decided before we were ready to pull the plug on that, it was a conversation we wanted with our user base. While I believe the ethnicity filter does promote racist behaviour in the app, other minority groups use the filter because they want to quickly find other members of their minority community,” Grindr’s head of communications had told the Guardian in 2018.
But other dating apps are following Grindr’s example. In a report by OpenlyNews, another dating app, Hornet, which boasts of 30 million users, followed suit. Alex Garner, the senior health innovation strategist at Hornet, who spoke to OpenlyNews said, “Dismantling structural racism is an enormous undertaking but as a community working together, we can make meaningful strides”.
“We stand in solidarity with the #BlackLivesMatter movement and the hundreds of thousands of queer people of color who log in to our app every day,” the statement said.
