Gay social network app closes new user registration for a week

Blued, China's largest gay social networking app, announced Sunday that it would close new user registration for one week and conduct internal investigations.

That came in response to previous reports by Caixin magazine that minors who've used the app have developed HIV infections.

Many HIV-infected gay men were found to be meeting sexual partners via Blued, which boasts 40 million users worldwide, which led to HIV infections of minors linked by the app, according to the Caixin report. Nowadays, the way gay men, including minors, meet their sexual partners is largely moving from offline to online.

A 10-month research project led by China sexologist Zhang Beichuan found that a significant number of users in Blued are minors, the report said.

There are clues showing that a number of minors and young people infected with HIV have associations with sexual partners they met via Blued, it said.

Mark Ma, a senior at Renmin University of China, told China Daily: "I have been using Blued for about three years. Sometimes several senior school student users are shown nearby via Blued's user positioning function."

Zhang told Caixin that he was worried that Blued's allegeduser registry rule, which bans minors, didn't work well.

At the same time, drug use, and a large amount of pornography and other information on the platform is further increasing the difficulty of HIV prevention, he added.

In response, Blued vowed in the Sunday announcement that it would integrate technology, algorithms, AI and content supervision departments to carry out a comprehensive content screening targeting underage users posing as adults, texts, and images and video clips involving minors.

Moreover, it planned to add fixed and visible anti-HIV tips and publicity portals on the personal information page with the largest traffic on the platform, and continue to open the public account authentication, providing free Blued platform resources for anti-HIV public organizations.

"My mother works at a public health facility helping HIV/AIDS sufferers with blood testing and I hope more minors can receive correct sex education and practice prevention," said Luo Huilin, a senior at Tsinghua University.

Meng Die contributed to the story