Dating Apps: The Inside Story (2025)

[bunniefuu]

- I hit dating apps

with a vengeance.

- The rush of getting

all of those likes.

- My first time on Tinder, I

actually got 200 matches.

- An Argos catalogue,

basically, but with people in it.

- Did you know that Hinge,

Tinder, Plenty of Fish,

OkCupid, Pairs,

Match.com, The League -

they're all owned by a single

conglomerate called Match Group?

- I'm Jonathan Badeen, inventor

of the famed Tinder swipe.

- The things that we monetised,

we tried to make them addictive.

- Tinder, the infamous hook-up

app, has hit eight billion matches.

- It was just the right thing at

the right time for the right people.

- Tinder ruined it.

Tinder turned it into a game.

- Ten years ago, I

would recommend them.

It's changed now.

- Kind of like a necessary evil.

- I do not feel safe

on dating apps at all,

and I feel like it's

getting so much worse.

- That's how detectives have described

a Teesside man who r*ped five women

in three years after

meeting them on dating apps.

- Dr Matthews was ultimately

convicted of drugging ten different women

and sexually assaulting

eight of those women.

- There are r*pes,

murders, kidnappings.

I was dealing with

the worst of the worst.

- I've seen things

you can never unsee.

- This is where Tinder started.

We're on Sunset

Boulevard, West Hollywood,

Beverly Hills, just

down the street.

Famed Viper Room.

Yeah, this building here,

this is where we came up with

the concepts for Tinder.

Every once in a while,

lightning strikes, and...

..struck here.

Hi. I'm Jonathan Badeen,

co-founder of Tinder.

At that time, we were

looking to disrupt things

by going sort of

the mobile route.

And one of the things that we had

noticed was that there really isn't

a predominant dating app -

that basically everything

had been web-based.

And it was also, simultaneously,

something that young people

had never really adopted.

And so we saw this

as an opportunity,

and we essentially went to

where the young people were,

which is on their phone.

And we launched

on August 2nd, 2012.

Basically, friends and

family are on there.

It was not a lot of people.

- There was no

go-to-market campaign.

It was just about, let's make

this cool thing and put it out there.

Period of the sentence.

- It didn't have

a lot of growth.

It was just sort of

sat there for a little bit.

- Like, no-one wanted to

admit, "I was on a dating service,"

because it's like you

had somehow failed in life,

that you needed some

service to help you find a mate.

We were seriously pondering

of, like, how are we going to,

like, ramp up Tinder?

- The very first version of Tinder

didn't actually have the swipe.

We had the heart

and the X buttons.

In the back of my head - I

don't know, for weeks or months -

I was kind of iterating,

trying to solve various issues

where I thought it needed to be

used one-handed, on the move.

One morning, I woke up with an

epiphany of how I would do that.

You would have a stack of cards.

You would swipe in one direction

to put them into the right pile,

or in the other direction

for the wrong pile.

And so that's really

where the swipe was born.

One night, when I was fixing

some bugs, I went ahead,

and turns out I was able

to add swiping capabilities

within a few hours.

And I'm not sure if I even told

everybody that it was in there.

It was never really meant to be

some sort of big key differentiator.

We didn't tell anybody about it.

- The magic of it was that it was

dating made mobile in your hands.

The swipe just kept you going.

That was the thing that kept

our time-on-site numbers, like,

super-duper high.

- At that point, the

marketing really started.

That's where we were

going out to colleges.

- Like, our first real

college marketing was at

University of Southern

California - USC - in LA.

It's not just a

run-of-the-mill state school.

It's, like, a

prestigious school.

- Basically, bussed in all of

these sort of who's who, I guess,

of the USC college

campus for this pool party,

and require users to

have Tinder on their phone.

- No-one had really

done college marketing

the way we tapped it before.

- We're talking about Tinder.

What do you know about Tinder?

- It's a dating app.

- I think people use it

to, like, meet new people

and, like, hook up or whatever.

- They launched Tinder by spreading

the word among college students

at so-called party schools.

- I hate to reduce it like

this, but it was like, basically,

throwing parties for cool kids.

- It was pretty exciting.

But it was really January

2013 - right after holiday break -

that's where things

start to blow up.

- One app that's causing quite

the stir on campus is called Tinder.

- I downloaded a little app that

could called Tinder onto my iPhone,

aka the phone, aka the Great

Swagoo Phone Magnificent.

- Oh, my gosh, - PHONE ALERI just got a message on Tinder.

- Liking someone on the

app is completely anonymous,

unless they like you back.

Then it's a match

made in Tinder heaven.

- This just, like, ready, willing

audience who is just going to, like,

take this in as their

own and adopt it,

and then turn around and

spread it just to all of their friends.

- The same company which

produced Match.com created Tinder

back in October. It was

created to remove the creepiness

of online dating for

college-aged students.

It was piloted on several college

campuses, with progressive results.

Within the first two months, Tinder

served over one million matches.

- Early on, seeding it with

that targeted small, fun,

like, excited user base,

it was like fishing

in a barrel, man.

Like, it was just the right thing at

the right time for the right people.

And they took it,

and they went crazy.

- Hey, hey, Jen.

I saw your picture on Tinder.

Are you regretting

that decision now?

- Erm...

No, I like flowers.

- Will you be my valentine?

- Sure.

- Aw. And we did it.

Tinder prevails.

- That was, I think, when we

knew we really had something.

- The new player in town, Tinder,

a location-based hook-up app.

It has attracted more

than a million UK visitors

in the last 60 days alone.

Many of us are spending the

day swiping left and swiping right.

You got a match!

- Laura!

- When I first

signed up to Tinder,

I was hoping that I

would find someone

that I would be with forever.

- So, my first time on Tinder,

I actually got 200 matches,

which for a young 18-year-old

like me was an instant dopamine hit.

- As a g*y person

growing up in a countryside

in the middle of nowhere, that

was my first contact, if you want,

with other g*y people.

- I hit dating apps

with a vengeance.

I was like, that guy,

that guy, that guy.

Like sweets in a shop.

- It was so exciting.

Basically, everyone was single,

so it was like playing bingo

with the whole of Cardiff.

- All of a sudden,

it's like boom.

Erm...

And we started to kind

of, like, grow, grow, grow.

And then, the Match people

would kind of, like, interact with us.

We were all acutely

aware of Match.

We were kind of like the

upstart misfits going about it

in our own way, and

Match, on the other hand,

was very much, like,

an established company.

I don't even think they understood

what they had in Tinder at the time.

- My name is Michael Lawrie.

I started at OkCupid full-time

in 2013 to 2022.

OkCupid had a very firm

place in the dating world.

It was based on very rich

content, a lot of questions.

Quizzes, testimonials.

All sorts of things

that users loved.

I started as head of moderation,

went on to become head of

safety, working across brands

with Match Group,

who own Tinder,

Plenty of Fish,

Meetic and Match.com.

Match Group, in its day, was

absolutely amazingly good

at what they did.

And OkCupid was in the group.

- Hello, my name

is Christian Rudder,

and I was one of the

founders of OkCupid.

It's now one of the biggest

dating sites in the United States.

Like almost everyone at

the site, I was a math major,

and, as you might expect, we're

known for the analytic approach

we have taken to love.

- The people who founded

OkCupid were data scientists.

They were obviously interested

in data to make the experience

better for the users.

The match meant a lot.

We gave you good data on

how you match, why you match.

- We call it our

matching algorithm.

Basically, OkCupid's matching

algorithm helps us decide

whether two people

should go on a date.

We built our entire

business around it.

- And Tinder turned

it into a game -

purely swiping to decide

who's hot, who's not.

- One thing we did especially

at Tinder was, we really tried

to celebrate that moment

when you get a match.

So, you get a match - I don't know

exactly what the UI looks like now -

but back then we opened

up this screen that was like,

yeah, it's a match.

Congratulations. You can

start this conversation now.

So these are like very tried

and true game mechanics.

- BF Skinner was a psychologist

who studied human behaviour.

- Eventually, a culture

learns how to build a world

in which people

behave more effectively.

- Had done these

tests with pigeons.

- A pigeon's behaviour can be

shaped purely by rewards of food pellets.

- They could press a button.

And he would change how that

would work, whether the button would -

you know, you press it, and

every time you'd get something,

or you press it and

nothing ever happens.

- By random pecking, he occasionally

hits the jackpot, which encourages

him to press on with this

seemingly un-pigeonlike behaviour.

- And this is sort of modelled

into human behaviour, too.

These variable rewards are

how you can better motivate

a person to do something.

- Once in a while, you get

something which is highly reinforcing.

And other times you don't.

- In Tinder, we were

cognisant of that idea.

We knew, in order

for people to match,

to meet the right person,

they needed to go through a

lot of people in order to do that.

We were trying to make

that card stack feel like

sort of random rewards in there,

in order to keep them swiping

until they were hopefully

able to get that match.

- Now, that's the heart

of all gambling devices -

the way in which it pays off.

- It kind of does

feel like a game,

cos it's like when you get a

match, you feel like you win.

And if they don't match you

back, yeah, it feels like you lose.

- I feel like, for a

lot of girls especially,

it's like validation.

So I feel like sometimes

it just feels like a game

of, like, who likes me?

- The whole thing is

like a slot machine.

You're presented

recommendations one after the other.

You don't know exactly

what you're going to get.

You might get a hot person,

you might get an ugly person,

and if you like them,

you might get rewarded

and get that dopamine hit,

and you might not.

- I started to research

online dating in 2014,

when I became aware of

the way that digital services

were accelerating and

commodifying the process of dating.

This kind of reward system where

you're getting positive feedback

through likes, hits, swipes -

it's this idea of

maintaining your subject

in a constant state of hunger.

So you just

continue to go online.

- So, as a product person,

yeah, my job is to really make sure

that you're engaged, which

means you're using the app -

that's swiping, that's

sending messages -

but then also that

you're retaining,

that you're staying around.

And, you know, a lot of the

incentives are based around,

did we get a user to stay

from day one to day two?

From week one to week two?

- This is how you use Tinder.

- Yep, yep, yep, yep,

yep, yep, yep, yep, yep,

yep, yep, yep, yep.

- Lot of matches there, Dan?

- No matches.

- Yeah, I'll just swipe all

the time, literally nonstop.

I'll even be just at work,

and get told off

for being on Tinder.

- There would be moments where

I would just be sitting on my own.

"No, no, no. Yes, yes, no."

I mean, there are more

noes than yeses, to be fair.

And then all these

men kind of...

..merge into one

big blob of a man.

- It did feel like just

endlessly kind of swiping and...

I don't know.

Yeah, maybe it did get a bit,

like, feeling a bit desperate.

- It's kind of like

a love-hate thing.

Deleting your profile and

starting again so regularly, yeah.

Delete it, only to be

back on it an hour later.

So, it was mad.

- People were using

this app for hours a day.

Considering, you know,

you're awake maybe 12 hours,

use your phone five to six.

And we were capturing a

significant portion of that

just on a single app,

which is crazy.

- Best new start-up of 2013.

Tinder quickly set itself apart

by applying social graph data

and game psychology

to online dating.

Sounds like complicated stuff.

But, ultimately, all we're presented

with is the addictive simplicity

of a binary decision.

- We would have parties when

we'd hit a certain number of users.

- And the Crunchie

goes to Tinder.

- 50,000 or 100,000 users,

and then 200,000 and 500,000.

Thanks for swiping right!

Those milestones

started to come so fast

that before we could

plan the next party,

we'd already hit the next one.

It was a really

high-growth period and...

..and a fun time.

- We had monitors at the office

that would show our growth,

and it would be mesmerising.

We could see new countries

just, like, light up overnight.

Places that we didn't expect -

like non-English-speaking places -

like Brazil...

..just started

exploding on their own.

- That was when we started to see,

OK, this could go from being a really

small kind of start-up thing

to something that potentially

takes over the world.

- Tinder started out as a few guys

on a couch in a conference room.

Now it's 200 plus people in a whole

building here on Sunset Boulevard.

- We absolutely weren't

capitalising on it, though.

Like, we had no designs outside

of, we just want you to use the app.

We weren't making

any kind of money.

The only thing that we were

making was brand reputation,

and we were growing

at basically all costs.

- Since its launch in 2012,

it's made 22 million matches

worldwide a day, making six

billion matches in total so far -

up from a billion

this time last year.

- I didn't know that we were going

to be building revenue until I heard it

in a Match Group earnings call that

we were expected to make revenue

the next year, and I was

like, "Oh, whoops. OK."

Well, I mean, obviously

we're going to make money.

You know, it's a company,

we're trying to make money.

But, you know, it's

a matter of when.

Match Group had a lot of

experience in subscription,

and they encouraged us to

go in that subscription route.

- I was running research

for the organisation,

actively involved in the

development of the features

that were the basis of

the subscription model.

- Subscriptions ended up being

the vast majority of the revenue

that we earned.

- One of my first projects at

Tinder was called Tinder Passport,

and it was the feature that

allowed you to look at different parts

of the world to find a date, try to

understand the dating landscape

in a given environment.

- Tinder is making it possible for

users to have a holiday romance

without leaving their home.

It's all part of a new premium

service which the dating app

is launching today,

called Tinder Plus.

- And so, in 2015, we

launched with rewind, passport

and unlimited swipe rights.

- I'm in a different

country every single day.

I'm like, damn!

Y'all putting in new features

that I like even more?!

- We're always

trying to build features

that will help to

connect people.

And we're also

trying to make money.

And limiting the number

of likes that you have,

the number of super likes,

limiting the number of

boosts you can have,

all of these kind of, like,

scarcity-related features,

these are all game mechanics

that keep people coming back

and are also the ones

that you can monetise.

- Do you remember

those DFS adverts?

"Buy now, 50 off!

"Buy now, get two sofas

for free. Get a love armchair."

That's what it felt like.

- So embarrassing!

Just putting myself on blast.

Yes, I pay for Tinder features.

- And you think, oh,

I'll just spend 10,

cos you might find

the love of your life.

- You get sucked into

the likes and the roses

and the super

likes and the boosts.

The marketing

teams are so clever.

- Yeah, I'm the

hamster in a wheel,

and I'm very aware of it.

But I don't know what

the other options are.

- Scarcity rewards are

creating a kind of reward system,

where you keep

the subject hungry

in order to have more

control of their behaviour.

- I never felt like we were

taking advantage of people.

But, certainly, the things

that we monetised, we...

We tried to make them addictive.

- I definitely got addicted.

That dopamine hit

got a bit too much,

and I ended up getting addicted

to people finding me attractive.

- I'd feel, like,

bad about myself.

And then I'd log on to these

apps, and just think, wow, like,

so many people have liked me.

And then, I'm not

feeling, like, fulfilled.

- Looking back now, that

25-year-old who was just so desperate

to be liked and to be wanted.

That was the addiction,

and the app was the tool I

was using to fuel that addiction.

- Making something

fun is addictive,

you know, in itself.

It's unfortunate when somebody

isn't able to manage an addiction.

But the same thing that makes

it addictive for one person is what

helps other people

get through it.

If we were to get rid of

everything addictive in everything,

it'd be hard to get

anybody to do anything.

- Is being addicted to a

dating app worse than...

..being addicted

to a slot machine?

Where are you going

to lose more money?

I think it's far less harmful

than a traditional casino.

And who knows - you

might find the love of your life.

- Tinder, the infamous hook-up

app, has hit eight billion matches.

Sure, it sounds like a milestone

- but a match isn't a marriage.

It just means your pic

and silly profile blurb

got someone to swipe right.

- Did you say Tinder love?

# I'm not here for hook-ups

# Unless

# Um...

# You are

# Then we should talk... #

- It's disappointing.

In my head, you'd go on these

dating apps, and you'd, you know,

meet people that are serious.

But actually, what it is, is a lot

of spending hours on these apps

to then get horrendous pictures

and messages

and aggressive stuff.

- So, as a woman, it was

comments about having large breasts

and short hair and

being, you know,

barely legal, and

things like that.

And then, as I've

transitioned to male,

I had to really emphasise my

transness for my own safety.

- I get aggressive

language all the time,

especially being

racially ambiguous.

A lot of guys, I'm like, "Do

you want to take me out,

"or do you want to deport me?"

- You should really

go to a school,

or have a module to know

how to deal with dating apps,

because even as a

30-something-year-old woman,

I was sort of taken aback

by the number of d*ck pics.

I'd have messages just,

like, saying that people wanted

to have sex with me, they

want to, like, put me in my place.

Like, I've got daddy issues.

- Tinder continued to

recruit new members,

to grow as a brand.

Match floated on

the stock exchange...

..which bought it in

about $400 million.

- I was told that, basically, the

IPO of Match Group wouldn't have

happened if it

weren't for Tinder.

As we grew and we got bigger,

I think Match definitely was,

"We got to take the

reins a little bit more."

Got to take care of the

golden goose, I suppose.

- When the Match Group spun

off all their dating properties

into this publicly traded

company, the Match Group,

they started to kind of assert

a little more control over Tinder

and especially over

the executive team.

- Match Group being a public

company - boards and all -

and you're always expected

to increase revenue.

- Tinder has a

way of doing things.

You know, we invented a lot of

what I would call best practices now

for how to monetise

subscriptions, specifically.

At this point, Match takes

Tinder's business practices

and applies it to its

other business properties.

- Gamification became

a popular buzzword.

They introduced the swipe

across all the other brands.

Match Group put these

expectations onto the brands,

that they couldn't live up to.

So they made it a swipe

model without understanding

what made the brand the brand.

Turnover was the

model that Tinder used,

and turnover is

great for Tinder.

It was, at that time, by

far the biggest dating site

on the app stores.

So, it's getting tens of

thousands of new users a day.

OkCupid, Plenty of

Fish weren't getting that.

The pool of people you

could swipe was too small.

So, because you need more

people in your queue for swiping,

they had to change the algorithm

to make more people go in there.

They needed to lower

some of the expectations

and some of the deal breakers.

- I think they just

match you with anyone.

It gives you that

little bit of hope,

and then nothing

ever comes of it.

- I've had people pop up

who are, like, in their 50s,

and I'm like, no offence,

but I'm not doing that.

- Or these people could

be miles and miles away.

I'm not travelling 100 miles

to go and see someone!

- And then added features that

would bypass some of the restrictions.

Now, it probably

came in good faith.

I don't want to say it was

originally designed to allow that.

That was an accident.

But people who paid

could suddenly start looking

outside their expectation range.

And that is not

compatible with safety.

- Once dating became

mainstream on mobile,

it just became so easy for criminals

and scam artists, and whoever,

that these practices

just got out of control.

- PRODUCER: - So, just to

confirm that you're happy to take part

in an interview on the basis

that your face is

going to be anonymized

and your voice is going

to be anonymized?

- Yes.

I worked at Match for

the better part of a decade.

I was pretty high up,

working across all the brands.

There was an intense

amount of fraud profiles

that were basically built

and designed to get people

off of the brand and

communicating directly

to defraud that person of money.

There were plenty of

times where romance scams

liquidated people's

retirement savings,

people's life savings.

- Figures seen exclusively

by this programme show that

in the last year, a record

number of people - almost 4,000 -

became victims of

online dating scams.

Between them, they were

conned out of 39 million.

- In the 2016 era,

we had a wall of scammers -

a literal wall of scammers -

where there were

maybe 1,000 pictures.

And because the way the

models promote popular people,

and popular people are based

on people swiping on a photo,

they're putting pretty people

to the front of the queue.

And it's not a secret -

everybody knows they show

the pretty users first, they show

the pretty users on the front page.

But that photo may

well be a scammer.

- Well, I saw one profile, and the

photos were all Enrique Iglesias,

and I was like, I feel like

he's not on Hinge in Cardiff.

But, hey, I don't know what

he does in his personal life!

- People have been

using my pictures,

pretending to be me,

and then messaging

a whole load of girls.

And then I get messages

from these girls saying,

"By the way, someone

is using your pictures.

"He's been talking to me,

he's been asking for stuff."

It's a scammer, yeah.

- Fraud could lead

legitimate people to subscribe.

Fraudulent profiles tend to

have more attractive people,

tend to be more

desirable people.

And...

..when that's the case,

they do tend to get people to

pay a subscription to communicate.

- They want to see

attractive people.

They don't want to see...

people they see every day.

They want users that

say, "This is a cool site

"for cool people. Look

at all these pretty people.

"I want to be part of this."

- There's certainly people, you know,

trying to take advantage of the app

and abuse it in some way.

It's something that we were

constantly worried about.

You know, we built a trust

and safety team around it.

And a lot of times it's a

cat-and-mouse game, trying to do

what you can, and then

people figure ways around it.

- While I was there, we took measures

to block those people's accounts

or report them to

authorities, if required.

Having said that, like,

we were experiencing

a time of rapid

growth at Tinder.

So, you know, things like making

sure our servers didn't go down

were more important than, like,

you know, combating scammers.

- At the end of the day,

the only way to eliminate it

would be to shut

down everything.

- Match was very

interested in knowing the risk.

The attitude was generally

to make a business decision

about whether or not

the fraud should stay.

- Oh, yeah, they've turned

it into a scammer's paradise.

I wouldn't say it's tolerated,

but a lot of these bots, a

lot of these things will pay.

So there is money coming

in from these scammers,

and I don't even want to

begin to imply that's deliberate -

because it's not -

but it's a convenience.

Dating sites are different

from any other site,

in their job is to make

two people meet in person.

So you're making two

vulnerable people meet each other.

They need to trust that the

platforms are doing their best

to keep them safe, to

match them with people

who are there for good reasons.

- The more fraud

that is on the platform,

the easier it is for

someone to inflict harm.

Makes it less safe for people.

- In terms of harm...

..there's a lot of reports

come into the dating sites.

Everything you can think of

that would happen in a big city

is happening on a dating site,

because it's the same people.

And when you look at

Match Group's population of...

Let's say there's ten million

people on all of Match Group's sites,

that's the size of London.

So if you're getting the same

amount of reports as a big city

is getting on serious crimes,

they've got to be investigated,

and there's just not

enough people to do it.

- I do not feel safe

on dating apps, at all.

If I go on a date with

anybody, I do, like,

share my location

with my friends.

The amount of dates I've

come back from where I'm like,

"This man is an incel,"

it is quite scary, it really is.

And there's been quite a few

dates where I've come away

being like, "Oh,

he HATES women."

Do I just ghost him? Well,

that's going to anger him.

And he forced me to

let him walk me home,

so now he knows where I live.

- So, I met up with this one

guy, and straight away there was

something just very

different about him.

So I said, "Oh,

listen, I'm so sorry,

"I'm not feeling well,

I'm going to go home."

And then he just got so

angry, out of nowhere.

He tried to physically stop

me from leaving his house.

He blocked the door. I asked

him, "Please, move," got out.

It was wild to me just how

willingly, maybe, I put myself in

potentially harrowing

situations just to feel not alone.

- I went on a dating app date

and, yeah, had drinks.

He just kept

filling up my drink,

and then kept having a go at

me for not drinking that much.

I then said that I had a train

that I needed to go and get.

I didn't feel comfortable.

And then, when I went outside,

cos I said I wanted to leave,

and then that's when I

got sexually assaulted.

I don't think I reported it

because I just didn't feel that

there would be any support,

that anyone would care,

that they wouldn't see

it as their responsibility.

- SHE EXHALES

- My brother met his

wife on Match Group.

I met my ex-husband

on Match Group.

It really happens, it can

really work, it's really great.

It's just, the bad part

is so bad that, for me, it...

Ooft.

So, I worked at OkCupid

for close to four years.

I was a senior member of staff,

primarily working on

escalated serious cases.

The cases ranged from

harassment in person

or on the site itself,

up to kidnapping,

stalking, r*pe.

The team was very bare bones.

We were never able to meet

our quota in terms of completing

complex cases before

more complex cases came in.

- For serious

incidents at OkCupid,

even my team at its peak

- which was 20 people -

could not deal with the

amount we had to triage.

Triaging is painful.

We would get a lot of fake

r*pe reports from scammers,

cos if they knew that a man,

say, was going to report them

for being a scammer, what

they would do is then report them

for being a r*pist.

And that's really

hard to deal with.

What triage is doing is,

it's taking what we think are

the most likely r*pe reports,

then they're going to me, say.

So, let's say there's 300 a day,

I will get the top 100.

If there's not time the next

day, another 300 is coming in.

Unfortunately, the 200

are just not being dealt with,

and there's no way around that.

This was resolved around

2017, but for a couple of years

we couldn't keep

on top of it at all.

- The feeling was

similar to quicksand,

where you could not rise

above or make a plan to succeed.

- Dangerous and depraved.

That's how detectives have described

a Teesside man who r*ped five women

in three years after

meeting them on dating apps.

- Faces of Glenn Hartland.

But the most dangerous

one was hiding.

He was a sex fiend using

Tinder to find his victims.

The 44-year-old r*ped

three women he dated briefly

after meeting them online.

- Match was always

concerned about trust and safety,

but up to a point where

the impact of bad actors -

those people that are going

to do harm to other people -

should not be something that

the entire company knows about.

- My teams were put

behind walls, basically.

They were all remote, they

never interacted with anybody else

in the company

other than online,

and I think that was deliberate.

- We were told specifically

not to use language like r*pe

or m*rder with certain

teams within the company,

and so therefore we couldn't

put that language in presentations

or any kind of text.

- A lot of people, I suspect,

wouldn't be working for the site

if they were aware of

exactly what the issues were.

- I'm not going to say I think

they believe it to be something

that should stay secret,

but they definitely did not

want it publicised anywhere.

- Match continues to

buy up its competitors.

In 2019, it successfully

buys Hinge.

Its profits continue to grow.

However, there are increasing

numbers of bad actors

who are getting

access to these apps,

and the problem of safety

has yet, really, to be resolved.

- I think that Match Group

eventually, after a couple of years,

began to take it seriously.

And so they did invest

at a much higher level.

- The group started

cooperating more.

It was a Match

Group central idea

that we would start

sharing information.

It became a system

called Sentinel.

And that started to give

everybody more of an idea

of how much abuse was

going on on their sites.

- It's very difficult to shake what

one brand does versus another brand,

and every brand had their

own way of dealing with it...

..for a long time.

- When you actually

looked at the other sites,

it was very obvious that

their systems weren't catching

a lot of these people to

be able to escalate them

to the central Sentinel system,

which was an issue with

their front-line moderation.

Front-end moderators

are the lifeblood of any site.

- Being a content moderator

consisted of reviewing different profiles

and conversations, many

of which were reported

for different violations.

I encountered a lot

of different behaviour.

There was a lot of what

we call romance scamming,

a lot of sexual harassment,

aggression from men towards

women that was of sexual nature.

Starting out, it was less

demanding, but very quickly,

the quota around profiles

we were asked to review

ramped up to 52 an hour.

So we were asked to not take longer

than one minute reviewing a profile.

- PRODUCER: - We've spoken to a

moderator who was working at Hinge,

who started with 32 to 35

profiles whilst he was there.

It went up to 52 an hour.

- 52 an hour...

No. That's stupid.

That's not...safe.

- Then we get on

to serious cases

and you're looking at

about 12 an hour realistically.

- So, in regards

to handling reports

of things like sexual as*ault,

there really wasn't

more specific guidance

besides the same expectation

that things should be handled

and judged within the

one-minute timeframe -

clicking a button and

just moving right along.

There was really no

sense that, on our end,

there was any sort of

heightened attention

we were able to give to it.

- Problem with moderation

- from my point of view

of trying to get money

- is there's no profit.

It's all loss, 100% loss.

An executive person who comes

from a financial background,

they'll look at this, and they'll

say, "Why do we need it?

"We could outsource

that to the Philippines.

"We could outsource

that to Africa."

And the outsourcing

is the way they're going.

- The safety concerns

don't go away.

And in 2019, we see the

first of several investigative

journalist pieces...

..detailing how

convicted sex offenders

were actually able to access

users from these platforms

when they had already been convicted

of serious sexual as*ault and r*pe.

So, this begins to beg the

question as to whether the company

should be carrying out ID checks,

background checks on users.

- ID verifications were

always a good idea.

Financially, they don't work.

A good background check is

going to cost a lot of money.

For things like Tinder,

Hinge, OkCupid, Plenty of Fish,

where you're not expecting

to go in spending $100,

then it's not going to happen.

- We have a responsibility to protect

the women on our apps globally.

And so what are we doing to

make sure that they have a great

experience and a

safe experience?

We have "one strike, you're out"

policy and you're banned for life.

They're not just

banned on the app

where they actually

had bad behaviour,

but they're banned

across all of our apps.

- Building up the

systems to ban profiles

across the portfolio

was a fantastic step

in the right direction,

but that definitely gave

brands some pause.

Generally, when

profiles are banned,

it tends to affect the

bottom line of the business.

- So it was only in 2020

that the Match Group finally seemed

to be taking these safety issues

very seriously.

- Match Group

brought in an ex-cop

who'd been working for Uber

for a long time, Tracey Breeden.

One good thing she did was

to build a critical safety team.

- They made several new

partnerships at this time.

One was with Garbo - the

identity verification start-up -

and also a helpline for

domestic abuse called RAINN,

and publicly

committed $120 million.

- Every woman that

I've met in my lifetime

has experienced some form

of gender-based violence,

and when speaking to them

about how they use dating apps,

they've also expressed

experiencing some form of harm.

And so it inspired me to

want to work in trust and safety.

When I first started

with Match Group,

it seemed like they really cared

and were trying to change the way

that trust and

safety was viewed,

and really trying to create a

safer experience for their users.

But when, ultimately, push

comes to shove, it did not happen.

- Match Group's very good at what

I've always called safety theatre.

They will put a lot of money

into a pretence of safety.

- There's all sorts of

different forms of harm

that these apps are aware of.

And, in my opinion, consciously

do not make efforts

to really prevent.

For example, with

their sign-up process,

they would make it as frictionless

as possible, as easy as possible

for a user to get in, and

so safety is not by design.

- With the gamification model,

you've got to get somebody

hooked from the beginning.

You've got 20, 30 seconds

to get somebody on board.

So adding an extra obstacle

to the sign-up process

would get in the

way of retention.

- Asking for more information,

checking the things that are

correct all prevent the user

from getting in the app and counting

as potential revenue or growth.

This is not just a

dating-app problem -

this is a Silicon Valley

technology problem

where it's growth at all costs,

and growth historically

meant users.

- Stephen Matthews seemed

like a wonderful person

from his dating profile.

He's a cardiologist,

a lover of dogs,

very into the outdoors.

He was saying that he was

looking for a relationship.

My client met Stephen

Matthews initially by being

connected with him

as a promoted profile,

and he was paying to have

himself promoted on Hinge,

so they would actually have

him as a recommended match.

They scheduled a

date to have brunch,

and then to go to his condo

afterwards and go in the hot tub,

which she did.

The next thing she recalls is

waking up in her apartment,

crying and having her family

around her, taking care of her.

She had bruises on her body.

They had the sexual

as*ault exams.

The test concluded

that she had had sex,

and she didn't recall

at any point having sex.

She ultimately decided

to report him to the police

and also to report

him on the app.

We have evidence that Mr

Matthews had been reported for years

prior to this incident.

When they report someone,

they do receive a response,

promising them that the person

has been removed from the website

and removed from the

app and banned indefinitely.

My client's report ultimately

led to the police investigating

Stephen Matthews and eventually

more women coming forward,

which led to his arrest.

Dr Matthews was ultimately convicted

of drugging ten different women

and sexually assaulting

eight of those women.

- It's clear you can just change your

credentials and make a new account,

which is a serious,

serious security breach.

If they had listened to

the multitude of reports

that they had received

about this person

and just banned

him in the first place,

I would not be sitting here

today having this conversation.

- The ease in which Stephen

Matthews was able to continually get back

onto this dating app -

I think that not only

could it happen again,

I'd be surprised if it

isn't happening right now.

- They're a company. They've

got to make profit for shareholders.

I made my case every week,

and I know all the other heads of

safety in all the other companies

did the same.

- Over the years...

..there are less meetings.

The meetings were shorter.

And just a general sense of

"this is a back-burner priority".

- I went into it for

all the right reasons,

and because it was a

site that I owed a lot to,

because I'd met

my partner on there.

But one of the problems with

high-risk moderation

incident response

is that PTSD is

absolutely inevitable.

Mine was getting bad.

I was dreading

going in every day.

I was on clonazepam

and taking far too much

just to be able

to sleep at night.

I was dealing with

the worst of the worst.

It was just

impossible to carry on.

I couldn't face it.

- I've seen everything from

very graphic

photographs and videos

to all manner of abuse.

I've seen things

you can never unsee.

And agreeing to work there

would be, for me, dishonest.

- Every dating app

has a duty to people,

to the public,

to do what is right

and what is safe

and what is just.

The problem here is that

my definition of just,

my definition of safe

and my definition of right

doesn't necessarily align with

the people that

were my superior.

- Having had an

inside look at how

these companies make decisions,

it's clear that the efforts

that they do make are more

for the press and the headlines

versus actually

helping prevent harm.

- Match Group will tell you they're

doing their best, but they're not.

My team cost a

million a year to run.

The executives above us were

on three or four million a year each.

Cut the executive

salary, pay for safety.

Why not? Seems logical to me.

- My personal experience

with dating apps

is the reason that I wanted

to set up a dating app

that makes women

feel more protected.

I have started an app.

We're trying to make dating

eventful and fun, and it can either be,

you know, just with a person or

an event with other single people.

We have started

with half of the people

that have gone down. We...

MAN SHOUTS

- Chop, chop now!

- Dating should be fun,

exciting, and it can be.

So with this, it's doing

something interactive.

They're put in cells with

people, they're all sort of singles.

And then it's just to help

them sort of like chat.

GASPS, SHOUTING

Do you think it's good for dating?

- Yeah, absolutely.

- Fun, as well. - Yeah.

- So even if your date's boring,

you're having fun anyway.

- It's better to meet people in person.

- Yeah, it is.

- And I'm so tired

of the dating apps.

Like, generally, like, this could

not have come at a better time.

- Yeah, I know.

- Where would you say you are

in your dating-app journey now?

- Luckily, I'm not

on them any more.

Thank God.

And hopefully I never

have to go back on them.

- I'm engaged!

- I'm sure I'll delete it

again in a couple of weeks

because I'm so sick of it.

But, er, yeah, it's

the hope that kills you.