Morons are putting queer Olympians at risk by sharing their Grindr profiles
The Tokyo 2020 Olympics Games is the queerest in history. (AFP via Getty/ CHARLY TRIBALLEAU)
TikTok and Twitter users have been attempting to expose LGBT+ athletes in Tokyo’s Olympic Village by sharing their Grindr profiles online.
While the 2020 Summer Olympics is the queerest in history, with at least 168 openly LGBT+ athletes taking part, some countries participating in the games still heavily criminalise their queer citizens.
In an idiotic trend that could put closeted queer athletes at huge risk in their home countries, social media users are using Grindr’s “explore” feature to navigate to the Tokyo’s Olympic Village.
According to Insider, at least four TikTok posts and 10 tweets have revealed dating app profiles of Olympic athletes, with some sharing screen recordings to show their faces and names.
One TikTok video, which states “I used Grindr’s explore feature to find myself an Olympian boyfriend”, has shown up on the app’s “for you” page and has gone viral with more than 140,000 views.
The post is a screen recording of the TikTok user scrolling through Grindr, showing multiple profiles and exposing at least one person from an anti-LGBT+ country.
Anti-LGBT+ countries taking part in the Olympic Games include Iran, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, where being gay is punishable by death.
As well as putting closeted queer athletes who have travelled to Tokyo at risk, the moronic trend also threatens LGBT+ people living near the Olympic Village.
Japan recently ruled that its ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional, but marriage equality has not been legalised, being queer is still taboo and anti-LGBT+ prejudice is still rife.
Grindr has demanded that content exposing queer athletes is taken down
Grindr told Insider that users who were posting the athletes’ profiles on social media were “in breach of Grindr’s terms and conditions of service which prohibit them from publicly displaying, publishing, or otherwise distributing any content or information that are part of the Grindr services”.
The dating app added: “Out of respect for our users’ privacy, and out of respect for the contractual commitments these individuals made, Grindr demands that these individuals remove their social media posts that include images from the Grindr platform.”
A Twitter spokesperson said that the tweets “violated the Twitter Rules against hateful conduct and will need to be removed before the account owners can continue to use Twitter.”
PinkNews has approached TikTok for comment.
