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Grindr, the world's largest dating app for the LGBTQ+ community, is the second most blocked social media platform outside of India.
This means that gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people across 12 countries worldwide cannot access the popular app unless they are using one of the best VPN services.
This is one of the worrying findings included in the annual report of the digital rights advocacy group Access Now. Let's take a closer look at what's at stake and the steps to take to bypass restrictions.
Two more nations block Grindr in 2023
As Access Now's latest report can reveal, there's a growing list of countries specifically targeting LGBTQ+ people by imposing blocks on platforms like Grindr.
Jordan and Tanzania both issued new blocks on Grindr last year, adding themselves to a list of already 10 countries censoring the popular app. Iran, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and the UAE have been blocking Grindr for years. People in China, Indonesia, and Pakistan have also been forced to use secure VPN software to access the platform for a while.
"The widespread blocking of Grindr—the world’s largest social networking app for gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people—is an especially telling indicator that authorities are using blocks to deliberately marginalize specific groups of people," wrote researchers.
Worse still, Grindr bans came hand in hand with a global wave of intolerance against the LGBTQ+ community. In Jordan, for example, authorities blocked Grindr for the first time in 2023, while attacks on queer people intensified across political benches and beyond.