In mid-May 2025, a claim spread online that the gay dating app Grindr said it would reveal every Republican politician who "secretly" uses the app "if Florida doesn't stop passing homophobic and transphobic laws."
We found posts about the claim on Instagram (archive), TikTok (archive), Threads (archive), Facebook (archive) and X (archive). Writing at the bottom of one Instagram post that spread the claim said, "I told you gays and women will save this country. The brave out of the closet ones. Not the coward ones!"
The social media posts spread over two years after X account @HalfwayPost supposedly first broke the news on March 22, 2023. Other social media accounts shared the alleged "breaking news" at the time, while at least one Snopes reader asked us to determine its legitimacy.
"BREAKING: The gay dating app Grindr says if Florida doesn't stop passing homophobic and transphobic laws, they'll reveal every Republican legislator and party official who secretly uses the app," the @HalfwayPost posted.
BREAKING: The gay dating app Grindr says if Florida doesn't stop passing homophobic and transphobic laws, they'll reveal every Republican legislator and party official who secretly uses the app.
— The Halfway Post (@HalfwayPost) March 22, 2023
This wasn't true. @HalfwayPost posts comedy and satire content, according to its X bio (archive). "I don't report the facts, I improve them," it said. No reputable news publication reported the alleged "breaking news." At the time of this writing, the X post also contained a Community Note with a link to a fact check from The Associated Press debunking the claim.
The 2023 post came the same day that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' administration proposed to expand the Parental Rights in Education bill, or what critics have called the "Don't Say Gay" law, to prohibit classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in all grades.
The same day, a Florida House committee passed a bill that would expand a current ban on gender-affirming care for transgender minors, as well as cut insurance coverage of such care for transgender adults, among other changes.
For years, Grindr sold its data through ad networks, leading to privacy concerns. The Washington Post reported in March 2023 that a group of conservative Colorado Catholics had bought mobile-app data from Grindr to identify gay priests who had used the app. The paper previously reported how a high-ranking cleric resigned after allegedly being tracked using data from Grindr.
The tweet about Grindr wasn't the first satirical post from @HalfwayPost that we've covered. In August 2022, we alerted readers about another one in which former U.S. President Donald Trump supposedly told "his supporters to boycott the midterm elections because of how the [Department of Justice] is treating him so unfairly."
For background, here is why we sometimes write about satire/humor.