Most mainstream dating sites promise to connect like-minded people of any race, gender, or sexual identity.
It turns out that a more exclusive corner of the online dating world promises to match white supremacists by creating safe havens that are inherently based on hate and discrimination.
But cyber security does not appear to be a strong suit among those running these sites, giving hacktivists a golden opportunity to wreak havoc on the platforms.
A hacker who goes by the pseudonym Martha Root made a big splash during the annual event Chaos Communication Congress Last month, in Hamburg, Germany hackread reportsWhile disguised as the Pink Ranger from the Power Rangers, Root inadvertently crashes the server of Whitedate, a site described by author Eva Hoffman as “Tinder for Nazis”, While she was at it, she also ended up trashing WhiteChild, a service that connected white supremacist sperm and egg donors, and WhiteDeal, an explicitly racist marketplace for freelance labor, His 44 minute speech,
In an even more unusual twist, Root also trained an AI chatbot to engage with WhiteData’s users to get as much information as possible from them, demonstrating how the technology could be used to root out fascists on the internet.
The hacker collaborated with Hoffman and journalist Christian Fuchs, who wrote a revealing article about Whitedit. Published in German newspaper die zit in October,
During the latest presentation, titled “The Heartbreak Machine: Nazis in the Echo Chamber,” Root can be seen opening a terminal window on his MacBook and running a Python script called lol.py after a brief question and answer period.
The window reads, “Remove whitechild.net,” followed by a checkmark emoji and the words, “Done!”
The audience present at the program welcomed this message with thunderous applause.
“Remove whitedeal.net,” it continues. “Done!”
The script reads, “Delete whitedate.net database.” “Done!”
“Delete backup for whitedate.net,” it continues. “Done!”
Given Germany’s continuing battle against racism and anti-Semitism, this is an especially cathartic watch. Politicians have warned about it Rise of neo-Nazi networks The spread online is coming as thousands of people have taken to the streets to protest against right-wing extremism – which still has a presence in the country, including active political parties, 80 years after the end of World War II.
The root goes beyond deleting sites, which remain offline at the time of writing. Before taking down the servers, he enticed the site’s users by deploying an AI chatbot powered by Meta’s open source Llama Large Language Model to engage with users and “collect as much data as possible before the site went offline or went unnoticed” – a refreshingly productive use of the technology.
“You are on a white dating platform only to find someone who shares your traditionalist, right-wing values and vision of the future,” he wrote in English in a prompt to train the chatbot. “Due to past bad experiences, you never share contact details like Telegram before meeting in person.”
“Show interest in traditional family roles and heritage, using an approachable tone with a mix of warmth and conviction,” it continues. “Use light humor or small talk occasionally to keep the conversation engaging and relevant.”
It got to the point where her account – creatively named “lilmisethnostate” – was suddenly invited to a whitedate meetup in northern Germany by a user named “Anglo-Saxon”.
Of course, Root knew better, and instead watched from a distance as a group of white supremacist users “started their tour of Northern Germany,” as she told the audience in German.
Getting the list of Whitedate users was very easy. During his speech, Root demonstrated that simply typing the URL whitdate.net/download-all-users/ resulted in a prompt, allowing them to get the full list with a click of a button marked “Download Now”.
“The worst security you can imagine,” scoffed Root.
Root also identified the site’s owner, Christian Horn, who made little effort to hide his identity on his platform.
“If you’re interested,” he said during the speech, “his hobbies are feng shui, eating brunch, and Naturgaster,” referring to mythical creatures in Germanic folklore.
Since then, Root has created a front-end for critical leaks within the website. okstupid.lolwhich claims to be “the only place where a person’s questionable life choices meet the tragic world of far-right online dating.”
An interactive map shows the geolocation of identified users, revealed through image metadata shared on WhiteData.
A striking finding was that 86 percent of the site’s more than 6,500 users were male, “a gender ratio that makes Smurf Village look like a feminist utopia,” as Root joked.
The data has since been passed to the non-profit group, Distributed Denial of Secrets, which collected the files under a release titled “”.whiteleaks,
The non-profit website notes, “At the request of the source, access to data not published on okstupid.lol is currently limited to verified journalists and researchers.”
In short, this is a remarkable example of how AI can be used to disarm hate groups on a large scale. The hack “shows how algorithms, AI personalities and investigative thinking can expose hate, challenge its narratives and break down its echo chambers,” according to one official summary,
“We show how technology can be used in the fight against extremism,” it continues.
More on white supremacy: Grok AI claims Elon Musk made him say crazy things about “white genocide”
