"Everyone Says Them": Deception Typologies, Probabilistic Trust, and Grassroots Safety Knowledge Among Gay Dating App Users in China
For HCI and CSCW researchers, this work provides a nuanced understanding of deception and trust in marginalized communities on dating platforms.
This study examines deception on gay dating apps in China through interviews with 22 users, identifying a typology of deceptive practices beyond profile misrepresentation and documenting probabilistic trust strategies and collaborative risk recognition.
Gay dating applications have become critical platforms for sexual minority men to seek relationships and community, yet they also expose users to deceptive interactions that remain underexplored in HCI and CSCW research. This study examines how gay male users in China experience, identify, and respond to deception on dating applications. Through semi-structured interviews with 22 participants across platforms including Blued, Aloha, Fanka, and Soul, we make three contributions. First, we identify a typology of deceptive practices extending beyond profile misrepresentation to encompass relational, emotional, financial, and commercial forms of deception. Second, we document the layered, probabilistic verification strategies users develop through long-term platform use, showing that trust assessment operates as a multi-signal, provisional process rather than a binary judgment. Third, we demonstrate that risk recognition is a collaborative practice shaped by the circulation of experience, the abstraction of recurrent tactics, and the codification of shared rules within the community.