A 2019 survey by ProPublica and Columbia Journalism Investigations-one of the only articles ever to take this issue seriously-found that “more than a third of women said they were sexually assaulted by someone they had met through a dating app,” and “of these women, more than half said they were raped.” But when women try to report these incidents, many say the dating apps in question often don’t even respond. Could these biases explain the blinders?ĭating sites also have a big problem with sexual assault, which the companies do little or nothing to address. After all, it is women and girls who suffer most often from the abuses of online dating, as well as people of color and those in the LGBTQ community. (I was accused of being both when I wrote a viral story in 2015 that talked about the misogyny in dating app culture.) Or maybe it’s because the users who experience the most harm on these platforms are not straight white men. Perhaps this is because politicians and editors are afraid of looking like “olds” or prudes by questioning what the young folks are up to.
While Facebook and Google face relentless scrutiny, Big Dating companies are getting away with an outrageous lack of accountability.
And yet there is generally still a hands-off, if not downright celebratory, approach to Big Dating-the likes of Tinder, Match, OkCupid, Bumble, Badoo, and other dating service giants, which now occupy a multibillion-dollar industry and have hundreds of millions of users worldwide. Here we are in techlash-there are government investigations and media attention on everything from Big Tech’s dissemination of disinformation to its undermining of democracy. Lately, I feel the same way about a different technological trend: online dating.
Nancy Jo Sales is the author of American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Life of Teenagers and Nothing Personal: My Secret Life in the Dating App Inferno.
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