As Israel intensifies attacks on Lebanon and seeks to entrench its occupation of southern Lebanese territory despite repeated ceasefire violations, another front of the war is coming into focus: psychological operations conducted through some of the world’s most popular technology platforms .
In August 2024, the United States military ran ads on Tinder in Lebanon to discourage users from joining the resistance against the continued Israeli genocidal assault on the country – demonstrating the full spectrum of the Zionist military strategy.
Backed financially, politically and militarily by the United States – Israel has long aimed to engulf Lebanon with desires to reoccupy the South along with regular bombardments on civilian areas.
And despite there being a “ceasefire” between Lebanon and Israel since April 17th, Israel has bombed Lebanon over 3,500 times all the while pushing for normalization.
US CENTCOM ads on Tinder represent another front in the Zionist military strategy: psychological operations with militarized “dating” platforms.
Tinder, the most popular “dating” app in the world, boasts over 75 million active users in more than 190 countries. It is owned by Match Group – a multi billion dollar conglomerate that owns the largest market share of dating platforms – Hinge, Match.com, OkCupid. Plenty of Fish, Salams, and others.
Largest market share also means one of the largest data gold mines – personal and intimate user data, messages, video calls, facial recognition and location data on potentially hundreds of millions of users across Match Group’s dozens of dating applications. Tinder’s user data was found in a breach at Gravy Analytics – a data broker company who sells data to governmental agencies to be used for police and military location tracking.
But Match Group’s strategy and their technologies became fully militarized after Zionist billionaire investor and trump donor Paul Singer and his Elliot Management group built a $1 billion stake in the company in January 2024.
Paul Singer has long worked to integrate Israeli military tech into global markets – co-founding Start-Up Nation Central (SUNC), a Tel Aviv based nonprofit started to combat the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. SUNC works to promote Israeli tech and get Unit 8200 officers – Israel’s elite military intelligence unit – hired at all major US tech firms like Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Palantir.
In February 2024, Match Group announced their new partnership with OpenAI – in a press release written by ChatGPT. OpenAI’s technology has been instrumental in powering the AI genocide in Gaza. In February 2026, the company struck a deal with the United States Department of Defense – CEO Sam Altman sharing that the deal was made due to the Department of Defense’s “deep respect for safety.”
In March 2024, Zillow co-founder and Palantir board member Spencer Rascoff joined Match Group’s board. Palantir’s technology is used by the Israeli military to surveil, target and genocide in Gaza. Rascoff was then named CEO, replacing Bernard Kim in February 2025.
“Do not take up arms against the United States of its partners,” the Tinder ad read in Arabic, along with pictures of warplanes and the CENTCOM logo in August 2024.
Match Group was sued in February 2024 over allegations that the platforms are designed to turn users into compulsive addicts who never find love but are turned into “gamblers locked in a search for psychological rewards.”
Yet despite partnering with Paul Singer and OpenAI, installing a former Palantir board member as CEO and running US military ads in Lebanon – Match Group says that they are just on a mission “to spark meaningful connections for every single person worldwide.”
Jennifer Kings is a MintPress contributor, psychiatric nurse practitioner, sexual assault forensic examiner and former emergency medicine registered nurse with a graduate degree in global public health. She produces short and long-form content for her social media platforms and written work on substack. She is also a contributor at Vocal Politics.