Gay dating websites egypt

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Egyptian authorities do not deny going after the LGBT community. Police, state-aligned media, and the religious establishment see it as a public duty to combat the spread of homosexuality. The dating apps have sent these kinds of warnings before in various countries, such as Russia where a law against the promotion of homosexuality has been used to stop gay pride marches and detain gay rights activists.


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Visit www. When we called the waiter over, he came to our table and asked us to leave the restaurant. We were furious. We asked to see the manager and he said: "Get out of here! That hurt me deeply. In the current climate, I no longer dare to use applications to meet people.


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Undercover police agents use the applications to set up meetings with gays in cafes. About a week ago, a friend of mine was arrested in this way in Cairo. When I tried to call his parents, they claimed he was visiting family in another city. Samia A. Since October , there has been a real manhunt for gay people in Egypt. I think the new intensity of this repression is tied to the political situation in Egypt. Since President Sisi came to power, he has wanted to show Egyptians that he is as conservative as the ousted Muslim Brotherhood.

I am part of an underground group that helps LGBT people in need. When an LGBT person is arrested, we try to get in touch discreetly with their close friends and family to offer them support. The messages served as a kind of early warning system, a way to spread news of the new threat as quickly as possible.

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Since , Grindr has warned Egyptian users about blackmailers and recommended keeping their account as anonymous as possible. Some users even create profiles to warn others that a specific individual is a blackmailer or a cop. On Hornet, more than half the accounts have pictures, though many stay obscured.

One Egyptian man told me that when he visited Berlin on vacation, he was shocked to see that every Grindr profile had a face; it had never occurred to him that so many people might out themselves online. Screenshots are dangerous for the people who take them, too: a Grindr shot in your camera roll could easily become evidence in a debauchery case. Just having the app on your phone is a risk. Even if you know all the rules, all it takes is one slip to fall into the trap.

Gay Dating in Egypt

A local nonprofit worker named Youssef told me he tells friends not to use the apps if they have other options. At the same time, Grindr has struggled with a string of recent security issues, leaking profile data through third-party plugins and sharing HIV statuses with analytics partners. None of those slip-ups seem to have been exploited by Egyptian groups, but they can hardly be reassuring to users.

Hornet president Sean Howell told me it was a deliberate choice. We send warnings. But we have , users in Cairo.

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Are we going to send them back to a digital closet? One of the biggest challenges in designing these features is the culture gap between users like Firas and the designers at Grindr and Hornet. Both apps were built amid a thriving, sex-positive gay culture. In most countries, they represent that culture pushed to its limit. Thousands of miles away from the most vulnerable users, how would you know if you made the wrong choice? Researchers who are partnering with platforms have been struggling with those questions for years, and apps like Grindr have given researchers a new way to answer them.

Once we start messaging them, it creates more of a network. Once he saw how powerful the geo-targeted messages could be, he started looking for more places to use them.

Egyptian police use dating sites to hunt down gay people

The project would focus on three Middle Eastern countries with different degrees of repression: Egypt, Iran, and Lebanon. Egypt faced the most intense crackdown, but the threat had more to do with police intimidation than actual convictions. Iran faces a more subtle version of the same threat, with police more interested in cultivating informants than raiding bathhouses and making headlines. Lebanon is seen as one of the best places to be gay in the region, even though homosexuality is still illegal there.

The greatest threat is being accidentally outed at a military checkpoint and swept up in a broader counterterrorism effort. The project culminated in an person roundtable the following summer, bringing together representatives from Grindr, Article 19, local groups like EIPR, and digital rights technology groups like Witness and the Guardian Project. After Article 19 and local groups presented the results of the survey , the group puzzled through a series of possible fixes, voting on them one by one. The local groups were talking about what they think could help their community.

The technologists were talking about the features that they could help create.