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Gay dating app Grindr goes down in Dallas during RNC's Trump-a-Palooza
REUTERS/Brian Snyder
The Grindr Outage Is a Punchline. Republican Power Is the Story.
A Joke With Institutional Cover
A reported Grindr outage around Dallas coincided with the Republican National Committee’s convention, reviving a familiar online joke about conservative gatherings and queer dating-app traffic. Similar spikes were reported around earlier Republican conventions, including a 66 percent increase near the 2016 event in Cleveland. The Dallas evidence, however, establishes correlation—not the identities, politics, or motives of individual users.
That distinction matters. So does the…
The skinny
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