At Grindr, we believe in:
- Supporting a diverse, thriving LGBTQ community around the world
- Joyful self-expression, sex positivity, and consent
- Kindness, inclusion, and care for each other
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Safety, authenticity, and the right to privacy
Everything that Grindr’s moderation team does is in service of these values. We’re here to help you have the best experience on Grindr. It’s important to us to be transparent about our guidelines and how we enforce them, so that you understand our process and trust our decisions. We hope this page gives you the answers you’re looking for, but if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out.
Our Guidelines
Our Community Guidelines and Terms of Service are in place so Grindr is a safe, fun, and welcoming space for everyone who wishes to be here (and is an adult, of course). Our moderation team may take action against profiles, photos, and other content that violate these guidelines, including:
- Commercial Activity (advertising, selling any kind of goods or services)
- Spam, Scams, and Impersonation
- Harassment, Bullying,
- Hate, violence, discrimination, offensive content
- Promoting or engaging in Illegal activity, including offline/ in person assault and theft
- Seeking minors or harms to minors, underage profiles
- Pornographic content posted publicly
If you see anyone breaking our rules, please report them. Remember that you are fully responsible for how your account is used, so keep it secure and don’t let anyone else use it.
How we investigate
We use a mix of proactive (meaning before someone reports it to us), automated moderation (including machine learning) and human review at Grindr. This means that profiles may be automatically banned immediately after violating our rules, or after enough time for a human to review and make a decision. Grindr has developed and continues to refine our proprietary technological tools and integrations that help us proactively flag potential underage profiles, bad actors, and/or illicit content. We are constantly evaluating new technology to assist us with this work.
It’s important to us to make the right decision. When a profile is flagged, our moderation team may investigate the entire profile’s contents as well as the specific piece of content or chat message that was flagged, and the context in which it was reported. We value user privacy, so team access to user chat messages and images is restricted, and only when there’s a specific need, such as chat messages being evidence of harassment or abuse.
What actions we take
Grindr is an important way for many people to connect with the LGBTQ community, so we don’t take it lightly when we have to ban someone from our platform. We believe in education and giving someone the opportunity to correct their behavior, so we may give warnings, remove unwelcome content in the app, and/or issue a temporary suspension before issuing a profile ban. Banning is a last resort and we don’t like to do it!
That said, if we believe that someone is breaking our rules and making Grindr worse for our community, we don’t hesitate to take action. We may also take action to prevent future profiles from being created.
We enforce our guidelines evenly, regardless of whether a profile is paid or free: we moderate free profiles with the same level of care and attention with which we moderate paid profiles, and paid users don’t get a free pass to behave badly.
If a profile is suspected to be under 18 after registration, access will be blocked, and we require ID verification to continue using Grindr. We report illegal content regarding minors to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. For profiles suspected of using fake photos or impersonating others, we require photo verification to continue using Grindr.
Appealing a ban
We take great care in our moderation process, but mistakes (though rare) can happen. If you think you were banned incorrectly and wish to be unbanned, you can submit a ban appeal here. Your appeal will then be reviewed by a specially trained team member who was not involved in the initial decision to ban your account, so as to ensure a fair review. We will let you know if we require any additional information.
Please note, however, that we may not be able to share with you the full reason for a ban. It’s important to protect the privacy and safety of users who may have reported a profile, so we will not share details of reports related to private messages, offline incidents, or other information that may reveal who reported a profile.
We do require all ban appeals to be submitted through this form, so if you email us directly or fill out a different form, we’ll ask you super nicely to please fill out the ban appeal form.
If your account has been banned and you had an active subscription, you should cancel it so you’re not charged again. To read more about how to cancel, see our subscription help pages here.
Our Team
We believe that empathy is key to making good moderation decisions. In addition to general moderation training, our moderators regularly receive specific training on bias, gender, microaggressions, and discrimination, to help them make as fair and equitable decisions as possible. Our moderation team works 365 days a year, round the clock, in 6 different countries.
Our policy, leadership, and moderation team is made up of members of the LGBTQ+ community as well as parents, relatives, and allies of the LGBTQ+ community. We are committed to creating inclusive policy and enforcement that is helpful, not harmful, to the community. We spend a lot of time listening to our users and updating our policies and enforcement practices as needed, to ensure outcomes that are best for everyone, and we take pride in staying up to date about industry best practices (and driving those best practices ourselves).
Grindr is a member of the WeProtect Global Alliance, an international movement dedicated to global action to end the sexual exploitation of children online, and has endorsed the Oasis User Safety Standards.
Read more
As part of our commitment to fair and equitable moderation policy, we have published a whitepaper on Best Practices for Gender-Inclusive Content Moderation.
We also regularly blog about what we’re up to.
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