The gay dating app Grindr has officially removed the category of choosing filters for one’s ethnicity, which previously allowed suitors to search matches by race.
After their announcement on social media supporting the Black Lives Matter movement, the matching side has received several comments decrying the hypocrisy to maintain racial profile in their standards. The company has now given feedback to the issue, declaring that they will be gone and once and for all.
Writing on Twitter, the app said: ‘As part of our commitment to (Black Lives Matter), we have decided to remove the ethnicity filter from our next release.
We stand in solidarity with the #BlackLivesMatter movement and the hundreds of thousands of queer people of colour who log in to our app every day.
We will not be silent, and we will not be inactive. We will continue to fight racism on Grindr, both through dialogue with our community and a zero-tolerance policy for racism and hate speech on our platform.’
The dating app also said it would make a donation of an undisclosed sum to Black Lives Matter and the Marsha P.
Johnson Institute, set up in memory of the activist and self-identified drag queen who was a prominent figure during the 1969 Stonewall uprising.
It announced the move after deleting its post, ‘demand justice. #BlackLivesMatter.’, which had sparked a barrage of criticism.
One Twitter user received more than 6,300 likes and 1,100 re-tweets when they responded saying: ‘Remove the ethnicity filter. ’Critics had previously slammed the dating app for having the filter, and had urged them to delete it. But in an interview with Buzzfeed in 2016, co-creator Eric Silverberg defended it.
‘A person’s choice of partner is deeply personal, and I don’t think we would presume to judge or tilt one’s choice of sexual partner, boyfriend or husband.
Ultimately each one of our own individual choices is profoundly informed by the community we grow up in, perhaps by the relationships we had with our siblings or parents.I mean, to try and unpack that would probably take years for each person and so, I don’t know… I give wide latitude to other people when they talk about the kind of people they’re into.
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