So @NicoHines basically just outed a bunch of athletes in his quest to write a shitty @thedailybeast article where he admitted to entrapment
— Gus Kenworthy (@guskenworthy) August 11, 2016
Thursday’s (since-edited), “The Other Olympic Sport in Rio: Swiping” by The Daily Beast’s Nico Hines promises the sensational (“armed with a range of dating and hookup apps—Bumble, Grindr, Jack’d, and Tinder—your distinctly non-Olympian correspondent had scored three dates in the first hour,”), but the author fails to comprehend the real-life consequences for those he’s mocking, as The Advocate’s Daniel Reynolds details :
In a piece titled “This Daily Beast Grindr Stunt Is Sleazy, Dangerous, and Wildly Unethical,” Slate LGBT issues writer Mark Joseph Stern branded it “a uniquely disgusting and irresponsible entry into the tired genre” of “Grindr-baiting,” a practice in which journalists engage with Grindr users for editorial reasons that differ with the app’s intent.
What makes Hines’s piece uniquely “dangerous,” Stern pointed out, is that the original version provided details like nationality and physical descriptions that could be used to out an athlete — a dangerous prospect indeed for competitors from anti-LGBT nations.
The Daily Beast has since revised the article to omit descriptions of athletes that might reveal their identity. A look at the URL suggests the title has also been changed. It is currently “The Other Olympic Sport in Rio: Swiping,” while the HTML reads, “i-got-three-grindr-dates-in-an-hour-in-the-olympic-village.html.”