MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Now, if you're at a point in your life where you're looking for a romantic partner, then you almost certainly know about or have considered the apps. A Pew research pull from 2023 found that 1 in 10 American adults in a relationship met their partner on a dating app. But how safe are those apps? A team of journalists undertook an 18-month investigation into the Match Group, which owns Tinder, Hinge and other online dating apps used by millions of people every month. They found that the company is slow to ban users after they are accused of assault and other bad behavior. I spoke with reporter Emily Elena Dugdale. She worked on that investigation, which was produced with the Pulitzer Center's AI Accountability Network.
In your reporting, you start with a very disturbing case. You point to a case involving a cardiologist in Denver who was just sentenced to a lengthy prison term after a jury convicted him for sexually assaulting and drugging multiple women. How is Match Group involved in that case?
EMILY ELENA DUGDALE: Yeah. So Stephen Matthews used Match Group apps Tinder and Hinge to match with and then sexually assault and drug women. He was reported in the app as far back as 2020 but was able to continue using them and assault women for years. He was only stopped when a survivor went to the police. In fact, after he was reported, he was even featured as a standout date on Hinge, which means the app actually promoted his profile to women looking for matches.
MARTIN: You wrote that Match Group actually dismantled safety efforts that they rolled out five years ago after pressure from Wall Street investors. What happened?
DUGDALE: Yeah. So on the heels of some bad press, Match Group created a new safety team in 2020 and promised to release what's known in tech circles as a transparency report, which would tell the public about the number of people reported for rape and other bad activity on their platforms so that users can assess the risk. Basically, it would give the public an idea of what's happening under the hood in terms of harm. Five years have passed, but that report hasn't been published.
MARTIN: Why not?
DUGDALE: Good question. We got hundreds of internal company documents. They showed the company waffled over what information to keep secret. And one employee wrote that they felt pressured to rush through safety checks and cut corners. They wrote, quote, "the obsession with metrics and having to stick with them is frustrating and potentially dangerous. This is not the way we were meant to work and people's lives are at risk."
MARTIN: What does Match Group have to say about all this?
DUGDALE: So we sent Match Group a four-page statement, detailing everything we found. The company responded with a short statement. Match Group said it was an industry leader on safety, using, quote, "harassment-preventing AI tools, ID verification for profiles and investments in communicating with law enforcement." They said that they are committed to doing the work to make dating safer on the platforms. But that's not what we found when we tested their apps. We partnered with The Markup, who led an experiment where we created dating profiles that we reported for sexual assault and then were banned. We found that users could quickly create Tinder accounts with the exact same name, birthday and profile photos used on their banned accounts. They can also hop over to Hinge and other apps without changing those details.
And that cardiologist I was talking about earlier, he was sentenced to 158 years in prison. The reality is if he were released today, he could get right back on a dating app.
MARTIN: The same company owns these apps. Why don't they ban bad actors across platforms?
DUGDALE: One of the issues when we talked to employees was just that it takes a lot of human labor and time to be able to thoroughly investigate these cases. It takes sometimes hours. You know, we quoted one of these employees, Michael Lawrie, who said, you know, he was spending hours and hours sometimes on a case and felt a lot of pressure to speed up. And so I think, unfortunately, it's just that these are expensive hires, and the company really wanted to go a more cheap route. And so a lot of that work was outsourced to folks who don't have that same level of experience.
MARTIN: You know, some might argue, well, millions of people use these apps, and they have some bad experiences. But people who meet people in other ways have bad experiences, too. Like, what would you say to that?
DUGDALE: I think the issue here is that Match Group knows that there are people on their apps who are on there to harm others. And they could actually share that information so that users could really assess their risk and decide whether or not they want to use that platform.
MARTIN: That is Emily Elena Dugdale. She is an investigative reporter who looked into the safety of dating apps. You can read her reporting in The Guardian, The Markup or The 19th. Emily, thanks so much for sharing your reporting.
DUGDALE: Thanks for having me.
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