Women on Bumble are luring MAGA rioters into sending incriminating evidence, sending it to FBI

Dating app Bumble had temporarily suspended its political filter in the wake of users baiting MAGA rioters and turning them over to law enforcement authorities. A user revealed on Twitter that Bumble users switched their political filter to conservative and encouraged MAGA rioters to send them pictures and videos of themselves at the insurrection. They then forwarded the evidence to the FBI, reported Business Insider. It appeared a lot of users were targeting MAGA rioters via the app by changing their filters and getting them to share incriminating evidence of their participation in the riots that cause five deaths including that of a police officer. 

It all started a woman named Alia Awadallah revealed that a lot of MAGA rioters were on Bumble. "There are DOZENS of men on DC dating apps right now who were clearly here for the insurrection attempt," she tweeted. "Some say it directly, others are obvious from MAGA clothing, location tags, etc. Is that info useful at all for law enforcement?" One of her followers sent her the link to the FBI tips website, and Awadallah said she had submitted some evidence that she came across. The FBI has sought help from the public in identifying the extremists who attacked Capitol Hill on January 6 as Congress prepared to confirm Joe Biden as the winner of the Presidential election. More than 100 people have been arrested for their role in the riots. 

Twitter user, Allison Norris, replied to Awadallah stating that she knew a friend who had changed her Bumble profile to conservative, to find Republicans who had taken part in the riot in the hope of getting them to send her incriminating evidence. "She's matching with the MAGA bros and they're bragging and sending her pics and videos of them in the Capitol. She's sending them to the FBI," said Norris. The tweet went viral and was liked more than 27,000 times. John Sipher, a former CIA spy, replied: "Well played." It appeared to briefly start a movement as one person tweeted, "Get in girls. We're going hunting."

Bumble announced that it was disabling the feature. "We've temporarily removed our politics filter to prevent misuse. However, please rest assured that we prohibit any content that promotes terrorism or racial hatred, and we've already removed any users that have been confirmed as participants in the attack of the US Capitol," read a statement from the dating app.

However, the dating app confirmed that it later reinstated the filter. "On January 13, we took the action to temporarily remove our politics filter in an effort to prevent that kind of misuse and abuse while we took the steps necessary to ensure we had the proper moderation tools and protocols in place. Having completed that process, the politics filter has been turned back on in the United States," a spokesperson for Bumble told Fox News.

The political filter enabled the dating app users to list themselves as "liberal," "conservative," "moderate" or "apolitical." Bumble acknowledged people were using the platform to "to spread insurrectionist content or who have attempted to organize and incite terrorism," said the spokesperson. The company also said it would prohibit anyone from spreading false information questioning the integrity of the U.S. election.  “On January 6, we immediately ensured that our hate speech scanning and protocols addressed the attack on the U.S. Capitol and began removing any insurrection-related content from our platform,” said a spokesperson, reported The Verge. “If we see anything that would suggest someone has or is in the process of committing a potentially criminal act we will take appropriate steps with law enforcement.”