Dating Apps Are Even Less Transparent Than Facebook and Google

OTI policy analyst Spandana Singh wrote for Slate's Future Tense about transparency issues among popular dating apps. Though the conversation around online accountability often centers Facebook and Google, dating apps face some of the same problems.

Others fall short. Some major services (here’s looking at you, Hinge) have nested their community guidelines in their Terms of Service, which is full of legal jargon and not accessible to the average user. This lack of clarity around content policies is also especially visible the more niche the dating app is. A simple search for Dil Mil’s community guidelines leads you to a 15-page terms of use .docx file. Muslim Mingle’s high-level guidance on prohibited content is nested under the company’s privacy policy. The only clear exception to this is Grindr. This is likely because the smaller a platform is, the more resource-constrained it is. However, providing at least a basic level transparency and accountability around content policies should be a priority for all platforms, regardless of size. Without this information, a user in harm’s way has no point of reference to understand if the harmful behavior is permitted and a user who has been flagged has nowhere to turn to confirm that they are actually in the wrong. In addition, without these policies, it’s difficult to hold a platform accountable for keeping its users safe. Employees at Bumble have noted that although the company claims its policies make the platform less misogynistic, it has done little follow-up to map out if and how its enforcement has changed behavior.

Uber, another platform that brings people together in the offline world, publishes transparency reports outlining the volume and nature of safety incidents, such as sexual assaults, that occur during app-facilitated interactions in the offline world. (It’s the only tech platform that currently does something like this.) Social media companies also publish transparency reports that outline the scope and scale of their content policy enforcement efforts, including the removal of content that has been determined to contain hate speech, bullying and harassment, and graphic nudity. Despite calls for dating apps to follow suit, no major dating app publishes a transparency report.