I don’t want to be the killjoy here, but I do think this is the kind of too-perfect-to-be-true story one might find out a week later was fake news. I’m holding out for a Snopes entry.
Like remember how it was big news that people weren’t buying Corona beer during the early days of the pandemic because they confused the name? Fake news.
Not making a prediction here on this Grindr story, just urging skepticism until it’s confirmed.
And if it is true, I’ll laugh my ass off.
Update: A little over two months later and I just found the Snopes article. The whole claim started as satire and it seems like folks took it seriously.
Why is it hard to believe? This is a very well documented thing about Republicans.
They’ve been getting busted in truckstop bathrooms for decades.
Just because the story makes for such a hit of schadenfreude and self-righteousness for the left-of-what-the-U.S.-calls-“center” mind especially right now. (The Republicans have a history of being very anti-gay and librals (and everyone else, really) love to point out hypocracy like that.) And it’s very easy to imagine that kind of story could take off in the not-fans-of-Republicans wing of social media even if there was no truth to it.
And also, there’s nothing in the OP that makes it seem like anyone remotely reputable has seriously tried to verify it yet.
I’m not saying it’s implausible. (Nor, clearly, do I think it’s implausible it’s just made up out of whole cloth.) Just that it’s the kind of story that is likely to be swallowed hook-line-and-sinker by folks like me without consideration of whether it’s actually true or not.
Enterly reasonable but assuming it’s true matters little anyway. It’s confirmation bias for those who want nothing to do with the GOP and the GOP won’t believe it anyway, no matter the evidence (like climate change etc).
If it’s is false it won’t matter, if its true it won’t matter.
The screenshot doesn’t appear to be faked: https://downdetector.com/status/grindr/map/
Whether the data is correct is another question.
So it’s jam up in just about every major city? Looks like a general slow down to me.
When comparing it to another service that is used everywhere, like yahoo mail, Grindr appears to have more presence in Milwaukee.
https://downdetector.com/status/yahoo-mail/map/
Does that support op’s argument? Maybe, maybe not.
Here’s a local paper reporting on it.
The Grindr user said on a normal day you’d encounter maybe 10 users with no profile photo, but Thursday, when he checked the app, he said he stopped counting at 50 blank profile photos.
