White supremacist dating site profiles linked to Tory and Reform councillors

A Conservative councillor has been suspended from the party after appearing on a leaked member list of a white supremacist dating site.

The site was seemingly shut down live on stage at a security conference last month by Martha Root, a German hacker. Before erasing the site, Root had taken advantage of security weaknesses to download a database of the site’s users and last week published a sample of the data. About 450 of the 8,000 profiles shared online said they were from the UK.

People found by The Observer in the database appear to include an ex-member of the British National Party, activists with the neo-Nazi group Patriotic Alternative, and a man who ran for political office for Britain First.

Also listed is Lillith Osborn, a former teacher and Conservative councillor in Glastonbury, Somerset. When she joined the site in 2020, before she was elected, she described her political orientation as “pro-white” and said she was seeking a partner interested in “indigenous European spirituality”.

Osborn told The Observer she discovered WhiteDate while researching modern paganism and went on it “once or twice”. She said she has mixed-race children and only described herself as pro-white in order to be trusted on the site.

A Conservative party spokesman said: “Councillor Lillith Osborn has been suspended pending investigation by the Conservative party. The Conservative party has robust procedures in place to handle complaints. This process is rightfully confidential.”

A user called Gavin Beales also appeared in the database. An email associated with the profile, set up in 2019, shares a name with a Reform councillor elected in November and also appears to be from the same part of Northamptonshire.

The WhiteDate member went by the username Gavernor, which matches an Instagram account featuring pictures of the councillor. The user said in his bio that he heard about the site on Gab, a social media platform popular with the far-right. Beales, and Reform UK, did not respond to requests for comment.

Both Osborn and Beales were only active on the site for a short period of time.

“When elected officials show up in these spaces, it stops being private and becomes a public issue,” Root told The Observer. “The goal wasn’t humiliation. It was accountability.”

While it was still online, WhiteDate described itself as a platform for “Europids seeking tribal love”. Founded in 2017, the site said it was filling a gap for dating sites “exclusively for Whites” and was explicitly concerned with the survival of the white race. A flyer for the platform, created by “Aryan Graphic Design”, reads: “Only white people create white societies, have white babies.”

The site went beyond matchmaking and shared links to “pro-white” films (such as The Birth of the Nation, regarded as one of the most racist movies ever made) and “cultural content” collated by a self-described Aryan activist. This includes Third Reich Books, which sells books written by Adolf Hitler and other Nazis.

“WhiteDate wasn’t a dating platform in any meaningful sense,” said Root. “It was an ideological network using dating mechanics.”

Root said the security of the site was “impressively bad”. She claims that she was able to download a 100gb database of users from WhiteDate and affiliated sites by adding “/download-all-users” to the site’s URL. The total dataset is made up of more than 12,000 members.

Root also created an AI chatbot to engage with users and extract more information from them. “The bot didn’t argue, didn’t debate politics, didn’t radicalise anyone,” she said. “It listened. And once people believed they were talking to a sympathetic potential partner, they talked a lot.

“Many users openly identified as national socialists, talked about ‘white extinction’, or framed relationships as a biological duty.”

The theatrical removal of WhiteDate – on stage to cheers from attendees of the hacking conference – was not quite as live as it appeared. Root clarified that it was more of a “performance that visualised what was already happening in the background”. She wore a pink Power Ranger costume because, she said, “anonymity works better when it’s absurd”. The site remains offline.

The leak of user data raises questions about the ethical limits of digital vigilantism. While many have praised the actions of Root, some people online have expressed concern it may lead to attacks from the far-right. An X account for WhiteDate said the deletion of the site was “cyberterrorism” and that there would be repercussions. Root said she was careful about how the data was shared and that public profiles and images were only made accessible “so patterns could be analysed”.

WhiteDate’s creator, who goes by Liv Heide, claims to be a woman from Germany. In 2019, she wrote that people should “look at humans as animal breeders look at animals” and that finding a partner was a “eugenic choice”. Naming rights for WhiteDate are held by a Paris-based company. Heide is believed to be a pseudonym.

Photograph by Chaos Communication Club