In November 2012, they launched the Blued app, closely modeled at the time on U.S. Gradually, and with the help of a small team, Ma grew his site into an online community. “They may be facing more serious discrimination and feel more loneliness than the mainstream population.” “We still hope the LGBT community can have their own space, make friends, find content they like, and express their feelings,” Ma said. As recently as 2016, China’s media regulator banned portrayals of homosexuality on TV. Ma said he had intended his site to offer hope to people from sexual minorities in China, where homosexuality was criminalized as a form of “ hooliganism” until 1997 and considered a mental disorder until 2001. After media reports outed him, he faced enormous pressure from his workplace and even considered suicide, he said. The website was shut down many times, and Ma found himself having to switch servers repeatedly, he told Caixin. Ma Baoli, founder of Blued’s parent company, poses for a photo during a Pride march in New York, June 25, 2017. He called it Pale Blue Memories and mainly recorded personal stories and his own feelings in its early posts.
The company will uncover underage users disguised as adults and clean up text and photos related to minors, the statement said.īlued was started in 2000 by Ma Baoli, then a police officer in the northern city of Qinhuangdao, under the pseudonym Geng Le.
According to Zhang Beichuan, a prominent Chinese researcher of LGBT issues, Blued has overlooked key safety steps and allowed underage users to create accounts on its platform, exposing them to explicit content and sexual exploitation by adults.īlued announced Sunday that it would freeze new user registrations for one week to conduct an internal investigation, following the publication of Zhang’s findings by financial news outlet Caixin on Saturday. It has evolved from a simple platform allowing users to match and chat with each other to one offering functions like e-commerce and livestreaming, now considered prerequisites for success among Chinese apps.īut after years of rapid expansion since its launch in 2012, Blued is facing an obstacle familiar to many of China’s internet-based companies: critics who say it has prioritized growth over user safety. The app, founded by a former police officer and backed by investors including Hong Kong-based CDH Investments, boasts 40 million registered users, including 12 million outside China. Blued - China’s largest dating app for gay men - was once vaunted as a safe space where users could socialize and express themselves, protected from the stigma they face in wider Chinese society.