Grindr to remove 'ethnicity filter' after years of complaints

Dating and hook-up app Grindr has announced to remove the "ethnicity filter" from the next version of its app, this decision came in effect when the US is going through an ongoing protest against racism.

The app currently lets people filter potential matches according to their age, height, weight and ethnicity.

But critics say the ethnicity filter fuels discrimination and that the app does too little to tackle racism. For years, LGBT people of colour have flagged the ethnicity filter as an issue - but they received no response from Grindr. Many even got blocked by the company.

Announcing the change, Grindr said it had a "zero-tolerance policy for racism and hate speech" on its platform.

But this is being seen rather as a publicity stunt than maintaining neutral policy because white people are speaking up on social media. The most-shared social media posts written to shame Grindr into action were also posted by white gay men.

There are also LGBT people of colour who are disappointed that this change is happening at all. Some have told me that they used the ethnicity filter to find people like themselves, perhaps not to date but for shared experiences and cultural understanding.

In some cases it was needed. In February, at a queer club night for Black and Asian people, one party-goer showed me how black men did not appear on his Grindr until the white men had been filtered out.

Grindr is not the only LGBT dating app to allow filtering by race. The spotlight will now move to others that have yet to take a similar stance.

On 29 May, Grindr had tweeted "Demand justice. #BlackLivesMatter", with a link to further information.

This had prompted several users to accuse the company of hypocrisy.

One message saying "remove the ethnicity filter" was retweeted 1,000 times.

Grindr later deleted its own tweet and on 1 June posted a new message explaining its change of position.