BBC Trending: Are we dating the same person?

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 14 May 2025

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

At the start of 2025, a chat appeared on the encrypted messaging app Telegram. It was named Are We Dating The Same Girl? At first only a few hundred people joined. Soon that was thousands, and its content went from details of young women’s dating history, to revenge porn - sexually explicit videos and images. BBC Trending traces the Telegram group’s origins back to Are We Dating the Same Guy? groups on Facebook. But how did they first come about? Why are they seen as an important safety tool for some and something that has ruined lives for others? And how did the idea spread to Telegram, with serious consequences?

Transcript

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0:00.0	My name's Hannah. I'm 29. I live in London.
0:03.7	It's 2022 and Hannah has just started messaging a new guy.
0:08.8	She's single and matched with him on a dating app.
0:12.0	He's tall and musly with short hair and a serious face.
0:16.3	In lots of his pictures, he's at the gym.
0:19.2	But Hannah says she gets a bit of a weird vibe from him
0:21.9	over messages and decides to unmatch. A few weeks later, she's with a friend who's showing her
0:27.9	and are we dating the same guy group. It's one of a growing number of Facebook pages
0:33.0	dedicated to exposing cheating boyfriends. I don't have Facebook, but when I was with my friend one time, we were looking at these groups.
0:42.7	And I saw a guy that I'd matched with and had a conversation with.
0:46.5	It's the musly guy with the pictures at the gym.
0:49.9	She asks her friend to click on the post to see what other people are saying about him.
0:54.7	And someone said, oh yeah, this guy has been posted before.
0:58.2	He's actually in jail for killing someone.
1:01.2	Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service.
1:05.0	I'm Megan Lawton, a journalist with BBC Trending.
1:08.8	For this episode, we're entering the online world of Are We Dating the Same Person?
1:14.0	And looking at the reaction from some men, which takes us to some pretty dark places.
1:19.9	Just a heads up, there will be some discussion of revenge porn and child sexual abuse material.
1:26.8	Are We Dating the Same Guy Groups are something I've been following for more than two years. child sexual abuse material. Are we dating the same guy groups?
1:29.0	Are something I've been following for more than two years now.
1:32.3	I first joined the London group mainly out of curiosity.
	...

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