A from Marking It claims that the maternal company Tinder, Hinge, Okupid and other dating applications turn a blind eye to allegedly offensive users on their platforms. An 18-month investigation found cases when users who have repeatedly been reported about drugs or attack on their dates remained in applications.
One of these cases includes a cardiologist from Colorado named Stephen Matthew. For several years, several women on the match platforms reported that he was for drugs or rape them. Despite these messages, his Tinder profile was at some point, this outstanding status, reserved for popular profiles and often demanding the interaction of currency in the appendix. Matthew was not removed from the platform up to two months after one survivor went to the police. Match Group subsequently dragged her legs when Hinger received a search warrant, performing seven months later. In the end, he was sentenced by 158 to life imprisonment.
How was something like that, what happened? According to the internal documents of the company, mentioned in the investigation, since 2016, Match Group has known which users were registered for attack, drugs or rape with dates. In 2019, the Central Database of the Match Group, Sentinel began to record each user reported for an attack or rape in any of his applications. The company's insiders said that three years later the system registered hundreds of incidents weekly. But the system reportedly was ineffective and easy in the game.
Users could easily avoid prohibitions, subscribing to various contact information, but “the company's internal documents show information about IP -openings, photographs and date of birth, were not used to ban the user if they appear in another application for matches.” The Tinder user, prohibited for rape reports, could just jump into the hinge without problems. It is reported that there are many textbooks on the Internet in order to evade prohibitions on applications belonging to matches that practically do not require technical knowledge, and Marking I was able to check three of them.
But it was not just a poorly designed technical system that was to blame. In 2020, Match Group said that she would release a report on transparency in order to demonstrate the harm caused to his platforms – this report has not yet been published. In the same year, 11 members of the Congress requested information about the Match Group process after receiving reports on sexual violence. Three years later, two representatives followed after the promotion of the researchers of this report – no data has been provided so far.
In 2021, About increasing safety, but the company's insiders told researchers that it did not improve. In the same year, the report states that the presented presentation of employees asked many times such questions as: “We publish only where we demand the law?” And “We are starting how much we need to open, or are we trying to go beyond what is required?”
By 2022, the Match Group entered a major partnership with the GARBO data verification company; The following year, this partnership broke up, and Garbo publicly wrote that “it became clear that most online platforms were not legally committed to trust and security for their users.” In 2024, Match Group reduced its remaining central employees of the Match Match Trust and Seficient team, transferring positions abroad, who was described by the former head of the company's security department as work under tense quotas and with small training.
The report states that at least one employee at that time was worried about the potential danger of too much attention to the metric. They asked their bosses: “How much would you personally pay to stop only one person to sexual violence on a date, one child who sell people's trafficking, or one vulnerable person who is fond of a predator?” I feel that if I asked the employees of our employees this question individually, they would have raised the high value of their own money on him, but, as a group, no one is ready to hear this. ”
“We recognize our role in the assistance of safer communities and the assistance of genuine and respectful ties around the world,” said Kyla Waling, senior director of communications in the match, said in his statement MarkingThe field “We will always work to invest and improve our systems, as well as look for ways to help our users stay safe, both on the Internet and when they are connected in real life.” The company did not dispute the conclusions of the investigation.