Did an executive of the gay dating app Grindr say that the Republican National Convention is "basically Grindr's Super Bowl"? No, that's not true: Video on social media that makes the claim shows a user scrolling through Grindr accounts at a concert of gay Australian musical artist Troye Sivan, not at the the Republican National Convention. Lead Stories could find no evidence that a Grindr executive made this comment.
The claim appeared in a post on Threads (archived here) on July 17, 2024. The post's caption read:
An executive of the gay dating app Grindr says the Republican National Convention is 'basically Grindr's Super Bowl.'
This is what the Threads post looked like at the time of writing:
(Source: Threads screenshot posted on Wed Jul 17 15:10:36 2024 UTC)
The video with the post showed an unseen user scrolling quickly through many Grindr accounts. The post did not offer any evidence that this video was shot during the 2024 Republican National Convention, which was taking place at the time of writing.
Lead Stories could find no evidence of any Grindr executive making this statement. We searched using keywords on the Google News archive of thousands of reliable information sites, visible here, and found no credible documents or reporting to corroborate the claim.
Lead Stories noticed that many names on the Grindr accounts were "Troye." One username even had a question mark next to it: "Troye?" There also seemed to be a stadium full of people behind the phone in the video. Lead Stories searched Google using keywords and found the same video posted on X on June 27, 2024 (archived here). The caption to the X post read:
opened grindr at troye sivan's concert
Lead Stories searched keywords on X to see if an older post included this video and could not find one.
Troye Sivan is an gay Australian singer-songwriter and actor. On June 27, 2024, the day the X post was originally posted, Sivan was performing in London, according to the tour poster on his official website.
We have contacted Grindr and will update this article when a relevant response is received.
Other Lead Stories fact checks concerning LGBTQIA+ issues are here.
