After China’s cyberspace government promised to maintain a “healthy, festive, and auspicious online environment” during the Lunar New Year, the famous gay dating app Grindr was deleted from multiple app shops.
According to mobile research firm Qimai, the matching site was deleted from Apple’s App Store last Thursday, but it is unclear when it was taken from China’s other major app shops, including Android platforms.
Grindr’s deactivation came just two days after China’s Cyberspace Administration announced on Jan. 25 that it would renew a month-long campaign to police what it deems illegal and inappropriate content — such as online rumors, pornography, and superstitions — and punish accounts that break the law and spread problematic content.
A mobile screen with the “Grindr” app branding. Getty Images/Leon Neal
The regulator announced the clean-up campaign just in time for the Lunar New Year vacation season, which also happens to be the opening of the Beijing Winter Olympics later this week.
Apple and Grindr A request for comment from China was not returned. China does not have access to Google’s Play Store.
In China, two local competitors to the US-owned dating app, Blued, and Aloha, are still available for download.
Grindr users in China have reported problems sending and receiving messages, as well as loading photographs, in recent weeks. Some stated they could only use the app if they used a virtual private network, or VPN, which is a common tactic among Chinese internet users to get over the country’s censorship system, known as the Great Firewall.
Homosexuality was decriminalized in China in 1997, and it hasn’t been categorized as a mental condition since 2001, although same-sex marriage is still illegal, and homosexuality is still a taboo topic.
Last year, WeChat removed dozens of Chinese institutions’ LGBTQ-supportive accounts, blocking access to the accounts and deleting all of the content. Some of the accounts, according to the website, had infringed internet rules.
Grindr was developed by Israeli-American software entrepreneur Joel Simkhai in 2009 and sold seven years later to Beijing Kunlun Tech Co. in China. After experiencing pressure from the US government over national security concerns, the company was sold by its Chinese owner to San Vicente Acquisition LLC, a California-based investor group, in 2020.
