The US military’s latest psyop? Advertising on Tinder | TechCrunch

The U.S. military is using ads to warn people across Lebanon not to attack the United States or its allies amid rising tensions across the Middle East. Some of those ads have turned up in an unlikely place: the dating app Tinder.

Freelance reporter Séamus Malekafzali posted on X screenshots of the ads seen in the Tinder app, warning residents of Lebanon to “not take up arms.” The ads, written in Arabic, say that the U.S. will “protect its partners in the face of threats from the Iranian regime and its proxies,” which operate across the region, referring to groups like Hezbollah located in Lebanon.

The ads, which are not clandestine in nature, display the logo of U.S. Central Command and link to a tweet featuring F-16 and A10 fighter jets.

These kinds of military psychological operations (or psyops), aimed at influencing the views of a target audience or population, are not new, even if their placement on a dating app is raising eyebrows in the military community, the Washington Post reported Tuesday. The Pentagon in 2022 ordered a review of its psyops, which at times included setting up fake accounts on social media sites in violation of the platform rules.

However, Tinder spokesperson Philip Fry told TechCrunch that the military’s ad campaign violated its policies related to violence, safety, and advocacy, and “we promptly removed it.”

When reached by TechCrunch, an unnamed spokesperson for U.S. Central Command declined to comment on the record but did not dispute the Post’s reporting.