Lalrp.org: 
The publish additionally says: “Please take further warning each on-line and offline, together with with accounts that will have appeared reliable up to now.”
Egyptian authorities didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark. The Washington Publish couldn’t independently confirm Grindr’s claims.
Patrick Lenihan, head of world communications at Grindr, mentioned in an emailed assertion that the corporate is working with teams on the bottom to maintain customers secure and “pushing worldwide organizations and governments to demand justice and security for the Egyptian LGBTQ neighborhood.”
After debuting in 2009, Grindr shortly surged in recognition. It attracts about 12 million month-to-month energetic customers, based on firm information.
Grindr and different platforms like it may be an important supply of connection for LGBTQ communities in locations the place being homosexual is stigmatized or criminalized, and searching for connections in individual is very harmful.
However a report last month by Human Rights Watch outlined how “state actors and personal people” in 5 international locations within the Center East and North Africa — together with Egypt — have “entrapped” LGBTQ individuals on courting apps.
Grindr says it has a minimum of lots of of hundreds of customers in Egypt, the place LGTBQ individuals have lengthy confronted crackdowns and police entrapment, based on human rights organizations. (Grindr posted a similar warning to Egyptian users in 2014.) Earlier than this week, Grindr was sending a extra basic, every day security message within the nation; however the app made the message extra particular and extra typically after native rights teams knowledgeable them that dozens of homosexual individuals had been reportedly arrested over the weekend, Lenihan mentioned.
Whereas homosexuality isn’t criminalized in Egypt, officers have used “public morality” legal guidelines that punish “debauchery” as a authorized foundation for prosecuting males who’re suspected of same-sex relations, based on the worldwide help group Amera Worldwide.
The U.S. State Division famous “important human rights” points in Egypt in a 2021 report, together with credible accounts of violence “focusing on lesbian, homosexual, bisexual, transgender, queer, or intersex individuals and use of the legislation to arrest and prosecute arbitrarily such individuals.”
In its latest report, HRW mentioned that circumstances it examined in Egypt urged, “a coverage coordinated by the Egyptian authorities, each on-line and offline, to persecute LGBT individuals.”
Throughout one reported occasion, a 27-year-old homosexual man from Egypt advised HRW he was arrested whereas assembly a person from Grindr in Giza. He was allegedly held in a “morality ward” with no meals or water and crushed till he confessed to “practising debauchery.”
“Once they got here again with a police report, I used to be stunned to see the man I met on Grindr is without doubt one of the officers,” he mentioned.
HRW, which has reported that these alleged instances of internet entrapment in Egypt return to 2001, has accused digital platforms, together with Grindr, of “not doing sufficient to guard customers weak to digital focusing on.”
Lenihan, the Grindr spokesperson, emphasised that safety instruments have been developed to maintain customers secure, though discussing them publicly may threaten their efficacy.
Grindr has operated in a number of international locations the place being LGBTQ can have severe penalties, together with Iraq and Tunisia. It has despatched security messages to customers in 90 international locations.
Kyle Rempfer contributed to this report.
