Grindr ‘blocks explore function around Paris Olympic village’
Paris Olympics athletes have been protected from being outed on Grindr. (Getty/Canva)
Anyone looking for gay love in the Olympic village is out of luck: LGBTQ+ dating app Grindr appears to have disabled global visibility, to protect competitors.
Reports suggest that the dating app’s “explore” function has been limited in the Olympic village in Paris, which will be home to almost 15,000 athletes during The Games, which begin on Friday (26 July).
Posts on social media show users trying to explore the village find no profiles at all – an oddity, given that the app has more than 13 million monthly users worldwide.
Some people have suggested that the location was limited to prevent athletes from being outed against their will and to protect Olympians.
Similar efforts were taken in Beijing in 2008, when Grindr confirmed that the Olympic village in China was specifically limited to prevent users from finding athletes’ profiles.
According to a report in 2022 on Grindr’s decision to limit the visibility of users in Beijing, Olympians were still able to browse nearby profiles but were prevented from appearing on the app if they were in the area.
Not only was this to prevent harassment – which had reportedly occurred on the app in previous Olympics – but also to protect athletes from being outed if they came from countries where homosexuality was illegal or vilified.
During the Rio Olympics in 2016, a Daily Beast reporter was accused of outing several athletes by using the app in the village. An article was later removed after a significant backlash.
During the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, the app’s director for Equality, Jack Harrison-Quintana, said the organisation wanted Grindr to be a space where queer athletes feel “confident connecting with one another while they’re in the Olympic village”.
According to The Verge, users logging in the Paris enclave will be told: “Your privacy is important to us. Our explore feature has been disabled in the Olympic Village so that people outside your immediate area can’t browse here.”
You can read all of our Paris Olympics 2024 coverage here.
