Communication

Blued, China’s most popular gay dating app, plans to expand in Southeast Asia and in the U.S. while the Chinese government clamps down on LGBTQIA content.

According to Rest of World, Blued’s new parent company New Town wants to make the platform “the world’s largest social network for the LGBTQIA community,” and part of its strategy is to encourage user participation and community interaction, especially outside of China.

New Town’s CEO Li Ping sees enormous potential in the LGBTQIA market, and intends to grow the platform by targeting markets in Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, Southeast Asia and North America. “The growth of the LGBTQ population in Southeast Asia and North America is particularly evident,” a spokesperson told Rest of World.

Tinder has unveiled a new feature that lets friends and family choose your matches for you.

According to The Verge, Tinder Matchmaker lets users invite their loved ones and trusted friends to view and recommend potential matches, regardless of whether they are on Tinder themselves. How it works: users can start a Matchmaker session via a profile card or in the settings of the app, where they can create a link to share with up to 15 friends and family members. Matchmakers can either login if they are Tinder users themselves, or continue as a guest.

There is a time limit for sharing opinions! The invited matchmakers have only 24 hours to recommend profiles before the link expires. Then the Tinder user can look through the match list, where profiles will be marked as a “recommendation” for those who liked a particular match. (Those rejected profiles won’t be marked at all, and will remain in the running for the user to ultimately decide if they are interested.)

Match Group’s new queer dating app Archer launched nationwide on October 11th, which was also National Coming Out Day. And to celebrate, the app hosted parties at popular gay bars across the country.

The app’s headquarters is based in Dallas and Austin (also Match Group’s headquarters), which have some of the country’s most active LGBTQIA+ scenes. Prior to launch, the app was tested in the New York and Los Angeles markets and saw early success, especially among younger users. The company points out that 62 percent of people on Archer were 35 years or younger, according to Culture Map Austin.

The launch parties and events taking place in major cities (though not Austin), are in line with Archer’s mission: an app designed to foster a social environment. The app is marketed as a “social first” app, allowing users to express themselves through photos, messaging (including group messaging), and connecting without any kind of preset label. In fact, the profiles are arranged in feed and grid view options typically found in social media, rather than on dating apps.

Cybersecurity company Avast has pointed to a popular AI tool that is helping scammers build better fake dating profiles and manipulate unsuspecting dating app users.

Nicknamed LoveGPT, the software has been around a while, but now its capabilities are stronger since it has incorporated AI into its tool. Now, LoveGPT can create more believable and better crafted profiles to trap users into interacting with them, not realizing they are chatting with a bot. This makes it easier to lure them into a scam.

According to website Decrypt, Avast claims that LoveGPT can create fake profiles on at least 13 different dating sites while it scrapes user photos, messages, profile bios, and other data. (It stores the scraped data in multiple databases.) The tool then separates users into different demographic categories, such as age, to better target victims and create more realistic profiles.

Tinder has partnered with the Centre for Social Research (CSR) to create a new safety guide for app users in India.

The safety guide, along with 15 safety features that are accessible on the Tinder app, are part of Tinder’s efforts to improve safety for users. The new guide “leverages CSR India’s insights amid the intersection of technology and violence against women,” according to Tinder’s announcement.

Starting in September, Tinder users will get a prompt through the app’s messaging system on how to access the safety guide, according to the Hindustan Times.

The Australian government told the dating app industry that they must improve safety standards on their apps or risk being forced to make changes through legislation. Dating app companies were given until June 30th, 2024 to develop a “voluntary code of conduct” to address user concerns about safety.

According to the Associated Press, the government was basing its decision on new research that found three-quarters of dating app users in Australia between 2016 and 2021 had suffered some form of sexual violence. The research was conducted by the Australian Institute of Criminology and published last year.

Communications Minister Michelle Rowland noted that dating apps have become the most popular way to meet people, and therefore must improve when it comes to protecting the people using them. “The government is concerned about rates of sexual harassment, abusive and threatening language, unsolicited sexual images and violence facilitated by these platforms,” she said, according to Associated Press.