State government joins Tinder
The company behind dating apps Tinder and Hinge has matched with the SA government in a bid to protect South Australians on the dating scene.
US Company Match Group – which owns Tinder, Hinge, Match.com and OkCupid – has joined a state government roundtable today working to reform online dating.
The group joins the SA Law Society, Women’s Safety Services and domestic violence peak bodies as they discuss ways to ban domestic violence perpetrators from dating apps.
Acting Premier and Attorney-General Kyam Maher said Match Group first reached out to the state government last year after the country’s social media ban attracted international attention.
“They’d seen the hard work in terms of banning children from social media, and got in contact with us and asked do we want to look at a way to become another world leader in reform in online safety,” Maher said.
Law reforms to ban domestic violence and child sex offenders from accessing online dating platforms were an election commitment from the current Labor government.
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It comes after the Australian Institute of Criminology found about 72 per cent of Australians using dating apps experienced online sexual harassment, aggression or violence by someone they met online.
Coercive control advocate Leesa Scanlan said she backed having another barrier to stop perpetrators finding new victims online.
Scanlan said she experienced a coercive controlling relationship with a person who “stripped parts of me away through the cycle of abuse”.
“This person also used platforms like dating apps to move from victim survivor to victim survivor very effortlessly, and that’s why I think having these types of things in place is going to add an extra layer helping to keep people safe,” she said.
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“Seeking connection shouldn’t come at the cost of your safety.
“Today, meeting someone through a dating app is completely normal…People deserve to use these platforms, feeling confident that reasonable steps are being taken to keep them safe and to prevent people who have been convicted of serious domestic family violence or sexual offences are not using them to find new victims.”
Match Group’s Trust and Safety Senior Vice President Yoel Roth said his company wanted to work with the Attorney-General to ensure the offender ban was effective.
“This measure closely aligns with our ongoing focus on protection and prevention, supported by layered account verification, proactive moderation, easy-to-use in-app reporting, swift enforcement, and cooperation with law enforcement,” Roth said.
Maher said currently the framework they were looking at would put the onus on the offender, similar to existing legislation preventing convicted child sex offenders from working with children.
“If you have a conviction for sexual violence, for domestic violence, for child sex offences, then you will be banned from dating apps, and the onus is on you,” he said.
“If you go on dating apps, whether your own profile or you create a fake profile, if you’re one of these offenders and you’re using a dating app, you’re committing a further offence. This will, we think, act as a big deterrent.”
Maher said the reforms did not need the support of dating app platforms, but he had seen the platforms show “good interest so far”.
“At the end of the day, it doesn’t need to have these companies or these platforms on board,” he said.
“If we create an offence where the person who is the offender is committing the offence by going online, then you don’t need to have platforms on board.
“But it is in these platforms’ interest; they want their users to feel safe in what they’re doing.”
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