Most mainstream dating sites promise to connect like-minded people of any race, gender, or sexual identity.
A far more niche corner of the online dating world, it turns out, promises to match white supremacists by creating safe havens that are inherently based on hate and discrimination.
But cybersecurity doesn’t 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 Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg, Germany, last month, as Hackread reports. While dressed as the Pink Ranger from the Power Rangers, Root unceremoniously deleted the servers of WhiteDate, a site described by writer Eva Hoffman as a “Tinder for Nazis.” While she was at it, she also wiped WhiteChild, a service that connected white supremacist sperm and egg donors, and WhiteDeal, a blatantly racist marketplace for freelance labor, at the end of her 44-minute speech.
In an even more unusual twist, Root also trained an AI chatbot to engage with WhiteDate’s users to extract as much information from them as possible, demonstrating how the tech can be used to root out fascists on the internet.
The hacker collaborated with Hoffman and journalist Christian Fuchs, who authored a revealing piece about WhiteDate that was published in the German newspaper Die Zeit in October.
During the latest presentation, titled “The Heartbreak Machine: Nazis in the Echo Chamber,” Root can be seen opening a terminal window on her MacBook following a brief question and answer period, and running a Python script called lol.py.
“Delete whitechild.net,” reads the window, followed by a checkmark emoji and the word, “Done!”
The message was met by thunderous applause from the audience gathered at the event.
“Delete whitedeal.net,” it continues. “Done!”
“Delete whitedate.net database,” the script reads. “Done!”
“Delete backups for whitedate.net,” it goes on. “Done!”
It’s a particularly cathartic watch, considering Germany’s continued fight against racism and antisemitism. Politicians have warned about a surge of neo-Nazi networks proliferating online, as thousands take to the streets to protest against right-wing extremism — which continues to have a presencein the country, including active political parties, over 80 years after the end of World War 2.
Root went far beyond wiping out the sites, which remain offline at the time of writing. Before deleting the servers, she lured the site’s users by deploying an AI chatbot powered by Meta’s open source Llama large language model to engage with users and “gather as much data as possible before the site went offline or noticed” — a refreshingly productive use of the tech.
“You are on a white-only dating platform to find someone who shares your traditionalist, right-wing values and vision for the future,” she wrote in English in the prompt to train the chatbot. “Due to past bad experiences, you never share contact details like Telegram until after meeting in person.”
“Show interest in traditional family roles and heritage, using an approachable tone with a mix of warmth and conviction,” it continues. “Occasionally use light humor or small talk to keep the conversation engaging and relatable.”
It got to the point where her account — creatively named “lilmisethnostate” — was invited out of the blue by a user named “Anglo-Saxon” to a WhiteDate meetup in northern Germany.
Root, of course, knew better, and instead watched from a distance as a group of white supremacist users “kicked off their tour of northern Germany,” as she told the audience in German.
Getting the list of WhiteDate users was trivially easy. During her speech, Root demonstrated that simply typing in the URL whitdate.net/download-all-users/ resulted in a prompt, allowing her to retrieve a full list with a click of a button, marked “Download Now.”
“The worst security that you can imagine,” Root said derisively.
Root also identified the owner of the site, Christiane Horn, who put little effort into hiding her identity on her platform.
“In case you were interested,” he said during the speech, “her hobbies are feng shui, eating brunch, and Naturgeister,” referring to mythical beings in Germanic folklore.
Since then, Root has created a front-end for the considerable leak under the website okstupid.lol, which claims to be the “only place where one person’s questionable life choices meet the tragicomic world of far-right online dating.”
An interactive map shows the geolocation of identified users, revealed through image metadata shared on WhiteDate.
A shocking 86 percent of the site’s more than 6,500 users were men, a “gender ratio that makes the Smurf village look like a feminist utopia,” as Root joked.
The data has since been passed to the nonprofit collective, Distributed Denial of Secrets, which has collected the files under a release called “WhiteLeaks.”
“At the request of the source, access to the data not published on okstupid.lol is currently restricted to verified journalists and researchers,” the nonprofit’s website notes.
In short, it’s a remarkable example of how AI can be used to confound hate groups at scale. The hack “demonstrates how algorithms, AI personas, and investigative thinking can expose hate, challenge its narratives, and break down its echo chambers,” according to an official abstract.
“We show how technology can be used in the fight against extremism,” it continues.
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