Rape under wraps: how Tinder, Hinge and their corporate...

Match Group has known since 2016 about abusive users on its dozen dating apps, but leaves millions of people in the dark. The Dating Apps Reporting Project is an 18-month investigation. It was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center’s AI Accountability Network and the Markup, now a part of CalMatters, and co-published with the Guardian and the 19th. When a young woman in Denver met up with a smiling cardiologist she matched with on the dating app Hinge, she had no way of knowing that the company behind the app had already received reports from two other women who had accused him of rape.

Image Credit: the Guardian [Illustration of an array of red and white dating profiles showing silhouettes of men]

She met the 34-year-old doctor with green eyes and thinning hair at Highland Tap & Burger, a sports bar in a trendy neighborhood. It went well enough that she accepted an invitation to go back to his apartment. As she emerged from his bathroom, he handed her a tequila soda. What transpired over the next 24 hours, according to court testimony, reads like every person’s dating app nightmare. After sipping the drink, the woman started to lose control. Her memory blurred. She fell to the ground, and the man started to film her. He put her in a headlock, kissing her forehead; she struggled to free herself but managed to grab her things and leave. He followed her out the door, holding her shoes and trying to force her back inside, but she was able to call an Uber, vomiting in the car on the way home.

Image Credit: the Guardian [Highlights the bullet points “Do we publish only where we are required by law?” and “Do we push back on how much we are required to reveal, or do we try to go beyond what is required?”]

She woke up at home, soaking wet on her bathroom floor, the key to her house still in her door. She continued vomiting for hours. When she came to, she reported the assault to Hinge. Hinge is one of more than a dozen dating apps owned by Match Group. The $8.5bn global conglomerate also owns brands like Tinder (the world’s most popular dating app), OKCupid and Plenty of Fish. Match Group controls half of the world’s online dating market, operates in 190 countries and facilitates meetups for millions of people.

Image Credit: the Guardian [Highlights the quotes, “The obsession with metrics and having to stick with them is frustrating and potentially dangerous,” and “This is not the way we were meant to work and people’s lives are at risk.”]

Match Group’s official safety policy states that when a user is reported for assault, “all accounts found that are associated with that user will be banned from our platforms”. So why, on the night of 25 January 2023, was Stephen Matthews still on the app? Just four days before, Match Group had been alerted when another woman reported him for rape. A little more than a week later, he was reported for rape again. This time, the survivor went to the police.

Image Credit: the Guardian [Screenshot of a Zoom background showing The Avengers]

None of these women knew that the company had known about his violent behavior for years. He was first reported on 28 September 2020. By then, Match Group’s safety policy was already in place. Even after a police report, it took nearly two months for Matthews to be arrested – the only thing that got him off the apps. At least 15 women would eventually report that Matthews had raped or drugged them. Nearly every one of them had met him on dating apps run by Match Group.

Image Credit: the Guardian [Man with dog.]

On 25 October, a Denver judge sentenced Matthews to 158 years to life in prison after a jury convicted him of 35 counts related to drugging and sexually assaulting eight women, drugging two women and assaulting one more for a total of 11 women. Attorneys for the women said much of that violence could have been prevented. “It is shocking that for years after receiving reports of sexual assault, Hinge continued to allow Stephen Matthews access to its platforms and actively facilitated his abuse,” said Laura Wolf, the attorney representing the woman whose police report led to the arrest. Following best practices for reporting on sexual assault, the Dating Apps Reporting Project is honoring survivors’ requests for anonymity. Matthews’s attorney, Douglas Cohen, declined to comment. A letter that the Dating Apps Reporting Project sent directly to Matthews in jail went unanswered.

Image Credit: the Guardian [Highlighted statement “Our current ban categories won’t allow us to answer the public’s biggest question: Am I likely to be harmed on my date?”]

Match Group’s reach is so massive – its mission is “to spark meaningful connections for every single person worldwide” – that people are more likely to meet through its apps than out at the bars, at church or through friends. But Matthews’s case shows that even as these apps have made it easier for people to connect with a seemingly endless pool of potential lovers, they have also made it easier for people who commit sexual abuse to reach a seemingly endless number of potential targets.

Image Credit: the Guardian [Screenshot with black lines through fields including email addresses, usernames, dates of birth, phone numbers, locations, postal codes, and IP addresses]

In 2022, a team of researchers at Brigham Young University published an analysis of hundreds of sexual assaults in Utah. They found that attacks facilitated by dating apps happened faster and were more violent than when the perpetrator met the victim through other means. They also found that perpetrators who used dating apps were more likely to target vulnerable people. Almost 60% of sexual assault survivors self-reported a mental illness.

Image Credit: the Guardian [Two screenshots, one a of man on top of a hill with dog, the other of the same man wearing a white doctor’s robe, with a rose icon in the bottom-right corners of the pictures.]

Match Group has known since at least 2016 which users have been reported for drugging, assaulting or raping their dates, according to internal company documents. Since 2019, Match Group’s central database has recorded every user reported for rape and assault across its entire suite of apps; by 2022, the system, known as Sentinel, was collecting hundreds of troubling incidents every week, company insiders say.