AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

Today is Valentine’s Day. We end the show with a reporter and a whistleblower behind a major new investigation headlined “Rape under wraps: how Tinder, Hinge and their corporate owner chose profits over safety.” This is how it opens:

“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.

“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.”

We pick up the story from there with Emily Elena Dugdale, independent investigative journalist, part of the Dating Apps Reporting Project, an 18-month investigation with the Pulitzer Center’s AI Accountability Network and The Markup, now a part of CalMatters, which just co-published this major new report with The Guardian as well as The 19th. We’re also joined by Michael Lawrie, a former head of user safety and advocacy at OkCupid. He worked for Match Group for nearly a decade, leading a safety team for OkCupid. But he left there in 2022, became a whistleblower, is featured in this new report.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Emily, lay out what you found about Match Group, which runs half the world’s online dating market, with dating apps like Tinder, Hinge in 190 countries, used by millions. What happened to that woman in Denver?

EMILY ELENA DUGDALE: Yeah, so, unfortunately, the woman in Denver was one of many women who were sexually assaulted, drugged or raped by Stephen Matthews, who’s the cardiologist that you read at the beginning of this report. And like we open, Match Group was aware of the conduct of this person. He had been reported multiple times to the app, and yet continued to match with women on these apps, take them to his apartment, drug and rape them.

So, we found, basically, that Match Group is aware of a lot of the scale of harm on their apps. They actually track this on their back end. And in 2020, they promised to make more data available about the harm that’s happening on their platforms, but that’s never happened. And so, really, what we’re seeing — and we’ll talk to Michael a little bit about this, I’m sure — is that they are really choosing a profit model over the safety and security of their users.

AMY GOODMAN: So, in that case, ultimately, how did the rapist get caught, if woman after woman reported that they were raped, or he attempted to rape them, when they would report this to the dating app, when they reported this, for example, to Hinge?

EMILY ELENA DUGDALE: So, you know, one of the survivors of this attack actually went to the police. It wasn’t until that point, when he literally could not have a phone any longer, that he was off the app. And so, we saw again that multiple times this person was able to, after being reported, continue to meet women. The only reason he stopped was because someone went to the police and finally told their story.

AMY GOODMAN: So it wasn’t anything to do with reporting from the apps. It was a woman went straight to the police.

EMILY ELENA DUGDALE: That’s correct, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: And then one woman after another came forward after that? Are they suing Hinge? Are they suing Match Group?

EMILY ELENA DUGDALE: So, at this point, you know, there’s not anything that we know of that is happening on that front. But this man, Stephen Matthews, was recently convicted, and was, you know, convicted of — he’s going to be in prison for a long time. A hundred and fifty-eight years is the sentence that was handed down.

AMY GOODMAN: Are there any federal regulations to hold these dating apps accountable? What does it mean if you report to Hinge, if you report to Match.com, and say you were attacked, you say something happened to you? What are they doing with the information?

EMILY ELENA DUGDALE: Yeah. So, I think, similar to many tech companies, you know, there’s really little regulation that requires them to actually tell you what’s going on on their apps in this on- or off-platform harm. And so, really, what we saw was that the company was taking down information about people who are reported for harm on the apps. They are keeping that on their back end. But, unfortunately, since it’s so easy to actually get back onto these apps after being banned, it didn’t really matter. Somebody could get banned and then come back on pretty much instantly, with the same name, profile information, birthdate. And so, you know, the security measures that they have in place really don’t prevent somebody from coming back on and doing harm.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Lawrie, you’re former OkCupid head of user safety. You decided to become a whistleblower. Why?

MICHAEL LAWRIE: I was seeing a lot of stuff. I mean, one of the reasons I left was because I kept putting forward new safety proposals and trying to convince Match Group to stop gutting my team of humans and trying to switch to automation or outsourcing. So, it became impossible for me to carry on working there ethically and morally after a time. So, I thought, for at least two extra years, I should have stayed, I could change it. But it just wasn’t possible. They weren’t listening. Bottom line was always the problem. Every time somebody left, that job would be passed on to my workload, so we just weren’t rehiring people to fill the teams.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael, you have called these apps “playgrounds for predators.” You say Match invested something like $100 million in safety measures, but you called this “safety theater.” Did you get these reports of rapists and predators? And what were you told to do with them?

MICHAEL LAWRIE: I mean, we would do our best to keep them off the sites. But, I mean, when you look on the internet, you’ll see pickup artist forums and all sorts of things which are just instructing people how to game the system, how to use the site to pick people up. And I don’t know. We catered to, say, the BDSM community a lot, so there would be a lot of predators under the guise of BDSM people. So we’d be seeing an awful lot of stuff.

And I don’t think the people who were running safety at the Group level understood anything about the actual dating sites, and I think that was one of the big problems. They don’t — they didn’t understand dating sites. They understood safety, they understood security, but they didn’t understand the audience and who we were dealing with. Our job as a dating site is to make two people who don’t know each other and don’t know anything about each other meet up in person. And that’s dangerous.

AMY GOODMAN: You write in the investigation, “Repeatedly, we found … users, soon after being banned, could create new Tinder accounts with the exact same name, birthday.” We just talked about that. Michael, ultimately, the people most concerned about safety were forced out of places like — and people might just be shocked that all of these apps are owned by the same group, by Match Group — Match.com, Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid, where you worked as head of user safety.

MICHAEL LAWRIE: Yeah, I mean, we had our entire customer service team leave in a single week, all women, left in one day because of, basically, just internal abuse, like bad abuse. So, it was aimed at them, and they just all left. And then all the males in the customer service team left in protest within the next week. So, they were never refilled. I mean, we replaced that team of, what, eight or nine with one person, who had no background, no institutional knowledge. I think I calculated we lost about 99 years of institutional knowledge in one week. Me leaving lost 10. There was just no institutional knowledge left.

And it takes a long time to train an investigator in a dating site, for a start. You’ve got to have an intimate knowledge of dating sites, an intimate knowledge of your target audience, who you’re actually looking after. For customer service people, who were talking to sexual assault victims, they’ve got to be trained in that. They’ve got to be practiced in that. They’ve got to realize that only 2% of sexual assault victims are probably going to report it to the police. It’s a tiny amount. So, what your job is is to get them off the site. You can’t talk somebody into going to the police. So, it’s a bad job, because you’re always losing anyway. We know we can’t do that much, but we do the best we can.

AMY GOODMAN: How do people protect themselves? I mean, these days, you either meet someone online or on a line. But that online, as you’re describing, you have Match Group saying, “We recognize our role in fostering safer communities and promoting authentic and respectful connections worldwide. We will always work to invest in and improve our systems, and search for ways to help our users stay safe, both online and when they connect in real life. We take every report of misconduct seriously, and vigilantly remove and block accounts that have violated our rules regarding this behavior,” Match Group said in a statement. You say, in fact, Michael, this isn’t true.

MICHAEL LAWRIE: They do try. I mean, we’ve got to give them credit. OkCupid worked for years to try and do this. But when you’re having your staff gutted — I mean, even Match Group’s team, I think they just fired every single investigator nearly, a few weeks ago — a few months ago, actually. There is a brilliant legal team within Match.com — within Match Group, sorry, who deal with all of this. And they’ve been doing it for longer than me. I mean, most of the people in that legal team have been doing it for 15, 20 years now.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there, but I want to end by asking Emily: Do you hold out hope — in this last 10 seconds — for things to be improved?

EMILY ELENA DUGDALE: I’m kind of a cynic. I think people just need to be careful out there. The person you’re matching with might not be who they seem.

AMY GOODMAN: OK, Emily Elena Dugdale, independent investigative reporter, Michael Lawrie, former OkCupid head of user safety, I want to thank you both very much. And we’ll link to the report, “Rape under wraps.”

That does it for our show. A fond farewell to Hana Elias, our video fellow. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.