On 15 March 2023, the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre invited Grindr to respond to the allegations that the digital platform enables the digital targeting of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Tunisia by allowing abusive content on its digital platforms, and to respond to the recommendations to invest in content moderation and conduct human rights due diligence that includes identifying, preventing, ceasing, mitigating, remediating, and accounting for potential and actual adverse impacts of digital targeting on human rights, among others. Both the allegation and recommendations contained in the Human Rights Watch's report ‘All This Terror Because of a Photo’: Digital Targeting and Its Offline Consequences for LGBT People in the Middle East and North Africa”. The company respond to us by sending the response they sent to Human Rights Watch, below is the shared executive summary of the response.

Executive Summary

• We keep the app on and operational for as many markets as possible, despite government censorship, in order to provide a space for connections between queer people.
• We were a founding member of a coalition on LGBTQ dating app safety in the Middle East-North Africa region, convened by Article 19.
• We have spent the past eight years networking with LGBTQ organizations in the Middle East-North Africa region in order to better understand the human rights concerns for our community there.
• As a result, we’ve worked with over twenty LGBTQ organizations based in the region to broadcast their services, events, and opportunities to get involved in their movements to Grindr users in their area.
• We published The Regional Livelihood of GBTQ Using Grindr: Discrimination, Violence, Rights, and Relationships along with two partners – Middle East-North Africa Organization for Services, Advocacy, Integration & Capacity Development (MOSAIC) and the Arab Foundation for Freedoms and Equality (AFE)
• We have produced other research that has only been shared with coalition partners, such as Egypt, Lebanon, and Iran: LGBTQ and Online Dating - The Promotion and Protection of the Human Rights of LGBTQ Persons through Technology.
• Grindr has given away over one million US dollars to LGBTQ organizations in the region in order to ultimately change the conditions on the ground for our community.
• We have developed extensive safety features to empower Grindr users in the Middle East-North Africa region to navigate the dangers they face.
  • Weekly warning messages reminding users that they are using the app in a place where they may face danger and linking to our multilingual safety tips, which are themselves a version of our Holistic Safety Guide.
  • Disabled “show distance” feature so that exact distances are not shown in MENA
  • Users in MENA are able to “unsend” messages once they’re sent, to give users extra control over their speech.
  • Users in MENA are able to send an unlimited number of disappearing messages.
  • The “Explore” feature has been disabled such that users cannot use it to look into MENA from outside the country.
  • Private Videos are disabled in MENA because we cannot properly block screenshots of videos at this time.
  • Screenshots of profile images and images in chat are blocked for users in MENA.
  • Users in MENA have access to Report a Recent Chat, where they’re able to report other users, even if they’ve been blocked by those users.
  • The discrete app icon and PIN feature were developed to give users in MENA, and other particularly dangerous regions, more control over what shows up on their phone's home screen. This also provides an additional layer of security with a required pin code.
  • We have internal alarms set to notify the Customer Experience and Grindr for Equality teams if there is a sudden spike in account creation in MENA markets that might indicate a crackdown.
• Grindr’s moderation team, along with the entire company, receives twice yearly training on the specific risks our community and our users face in the Middle East-North Africa region. The first of these trainings for 2023 has already taken place.
• Grindr has dedicated moderation in Arabic. Our capabilities are inclusive of native Levantine dialects as well as Tunisian and Moroccan Arabic, in addition to other dialects. Our Spectrum Labs moderation tools also include Arabic language models for machine learning that are in the process of being put in place.
• We have made user reporting as open as possible with avenues for users 1.) to report potential bad actors normally, 2.) to report even when the offending profile has already blocked a user, and 3.) to report even when a user has already deleted their profile.