Grindr won’t allow users to add “no Zionists” to their profiles, but allows any number of other phrases that state political, religious, and ethnic preferences, according to 404 Media’s tests of the platform and user reports.

Several users received an error message that says “The following are not allowed: no zionist, no zionists,” when they tried to add the phrases to their bios on Thursday. I tested this myself on a new Grindr account, and received the same error message. I was able to add “Zionist” to my profile (without “no”), however, and could also add any phrase I could think of: “no Arabs,” “no Blacks,” “no Palestinians,” “no Muslims,” “no Christians,” “no Jews,” “no trans,” “no Republicans,” “no Democrats,” and so on. “No Zionist[s]” was the only phrase that was blocked in my testing.

Others have seen this message as early as May 2024. It’s not clear when Grindr started implementing this rule; “no Zionists” doesn’t appear anywhere in its terms of service.

Screenshot from Grindr showing “the following is not allowed: no zionist, no zionists” error

Its terms of service does state, however: “You will NOT post, store, send, transmit, or disseminate any information or material which a reasonable person could deem to be objectionable, defamatory, libelous, offensive, obscene, indecent, pornographic, harassing, threatening, embarrassing, distressing, vulgar, hateful, racially or ethnically or otherwise offensive to any group or individual, intentionally misleading, false, or otherwise inappropriate, regardless of whether this material or its dissemination is unlawful.”

In 2020, Grindr removed its ethnicity filter, writing in its announcement: “We will continue to fight racism on Grindr, both through dialogue with our community and a zero-tolerance policy for racism and hate speech on our platform. As part of this commitment, and based on your feedback, we have decided to remove the ethnicity filter from our next release.⁣” But the BBC and other outlets noticed that the app didn’t actually remove it for weeks and several updates after the announcement.

Grindr founder Joel Simkhai is Israeli and left the company in 2018 after it was sold to a Chinese gaming company. In September 2024, The Forward reported that “pro-Israel Jews” complained that they felt like they faced hostility on dating apps for displaying Israeli flag emojis or identifying as Zionist. In March 2025, the Association for LGBTQ Equality in Israel, known as the Aguda, reported “a significant uptick in attempted lynchings and stabbings that used the popular dating app Grindr to target LGBT people in the North,” the Jerusalem Post reported, where attackers allegedly created fake Grindr profiles to lure victims to them.

“It seems pretty explicitly pro-colonization and protecting of the ideology that genocide and ethnic cleansing are okay for certain groups to perform as long as it upholds your own personal or capitalistic interests,” Green, a Grindr user I spoke to who also saw this error message, told me. “It’s gross. And to put energy towards protecting a blatantly bigoted ideology and not put the same energy towards protecting minority groups is pathetic. So fuck Grindr and its inability to intersect queer oppression with the oppression of other groups.”

Grindr did not immediately respond to 404 Media’s request for comment.

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