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Egypt: Security Forces Abuse, Torture LGBT People

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Egyptian journalist Ahmed Saad is softspoken and reserved and a devoted Muslim. The year-old is also a self-proclaimed gay rights activist.

With his slight frame, Saad seems more like a polite high school student than the new face of gay rights activism in the Arab world. In order to accurately portray gays in his new novel, Shab Takaya, Saad spent time on the gay dating website Manjam. It begins with the apparent suicide of Haytham.

Based on the writings of the Quran, many Muslims believe that homosexuality is a crime punishable by death. Saad sees this attitude as a disastrous textual misinterpretation, and reminds us that God only punishes those who refuse to atone for their sins. Nevertheless, the book suggests the possibility that homosexuals may be executed if they refuse to commit to a heterosexual way of life. Saad explicitly confirmed what the book merely implies.

With these words, one cannot help but feel that in the book, Saad deliberately avoided explicit mention of what he sees as the legitimate execution of homosexuals. Perhaps, one suspects, he feared that delineating the stance would go against his mission of persuading a conservative society to become more accepting. With regard to his position on homosexuals, the true sin is unwillingness to change, not homosexuality itself.

Believing that every gay man deserves a second chance at heterosexuality, Saad is determined to become an advocate for that second chance by speaking out on behalf of gay Muslims, a group he affirms, that faces more difficulties than any other oppressed section of Muslim society. Saad is not alone in his condemnation of the unjust treatment, which often includes arrest and torture, of homosexuals in Egypt.

International criticism surrounding the issue reached a climax in , when Egyptian authorities arrested 52 men, beat them, and forced them to undergo humiliating trials because of their sexuality. Saad is also not the first Muslim to criticize persecution of homosexuals. Faisal Alam, a Pakistani American, founded the organization al-Fatiha in , which advocates for gay Muslims. It is a complicated stance that at once calls for forgiveness and asserts that homosexuality is acquired, and curable.

Raids on bars, house parties, and other gay spaces have become common.

As a result, channels for private communications like dating apps Grindr and Hornet are particularly important here. And to different extents, both platforms feel that they have some responsibility for keeping their users safe. In the weeks after the September crackdown, both Grindr and Hornet began sending out warnings through their apps, notifying users of the crackdown and giving the same advice about retaining a lawyer and watching for police accounts.

The messages served as a kind of early warning system, a way to spread news of the new threat as quickly as possible. Since , Grindr has warned Egyptian users about blackmailers and recommended keeping their account as anonymous as possible. Some users even create profiles to warn others that a specific individual is a blackmailer or a cop.

On Hornet, more than half the accounts have pictures, though many stay obscured. One Egyptian man told me that when he visited Berlin on vacation, he was shocked to see that every Grindr profile had a face; it had never occurred to him that so many people might out themselves online. Screenshots are dangerous for the people who take them, too: a Grindr shot in your camera roll could easily become evidence in a debauchery case. Just having the app on your phone is a risk. Even if you know all the rules, all it takes is one slip to fall into the trap.

A local nonprofit worker named Youssef told me he tells friends not to use the apps if they have other options. At the same time, Grindr has struggled with a string of recent security issues, leaking profile data through third-party plugins and sharing HIV statuses with analytics partners. None of those slip-ups seem to have been exploited by Egyptian groups, but they can hardly be reassuring to users. Hornet president Sean Howell told me it was a deliberate choice.

We send warnings. But we have , users in Cairo. Are we going to send them back to a digital closet? One of the biggest challenges in designing these features is the culture gap between users like Firas and the designers at Grindr and Hornet.

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Both apps were built amid a thriving, sex-positive gay culture. In most countries, they represent that culture pushed to its limit. Thousands of miles away from the most vulnerable users, how would you know if you made the wrong choice? Researchers who are partnering with platforms have been struggling with those questions for years, and apps like Grindr have given researchers a new way to answer them. Once we start messaging them, it creates more of a network. Once he saw how powerful the geo-targeted messages could be, he started looking for more places to use them.

The project would focus on three Middle Eastern countries with different degrees of repression: Egypt, Iran, and Lebanon. Egypt faced the most intense crackdown, but the threat had more to do with police intimidation than actual convictions. Iran faces a more subtle version of the same threat, with police more interested in cultivating informants than raiding bathhouses and making headlines.

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Lebanon is seen as one of the best places to be gay in the region, even though homosexuality is still illegal there. The greatest threat is being accidentally outed at a military checkpoint and swept up in a broader counterterrorism effort. The project culminated in an person roundtable the following summer, bringing together representatives from Grindr, Article 19, local groups like EIPR, and digital rights technology groups like Witness and the Guardian Project. After Article 19 and local groups presented the results of the survey , the group puzzled through a series of possible fixes, voting on them one by one.

The local groups were talking about what they think could help their community. The technologists were talking about the features that they could help create. And then people like Jack [Harrison-Quintana] from the business side were talking about what companies would be able to take on. The end result was a list of recommendations, some of which are already showing up in Grindr.

Gay Dating Apps Are Protecting Users Amid Egypt's LGBTQ Crackdown

Since October, Grindr users in countries have been able to change the way the app appears on the home screen, replacing the Grindr icon and name with an inconspicuous calculator app or other utility. Other recommendations were harder to implement. The group suggested that apps would be safer with disappearing messages or images that were harder to screenshot, but making that change might cut too deep into the service itself. For every real user in danger, there would be 10 accidental account wipes.

It would make users safer, but would it be worth the friction? In the background, there is an even harder question: why is it so hard for tech companies to take stock of this kind of risk? Pulling out of countries like Egypt would certainly make business sense: none of the countries involved are lucrative ad markets, particularly when you factor in the cost of developing extra features. Leaving would mean giving that up.

When Howell visited Egypt in December for Hornet, he came away with a similar conclusion.

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