A Commitment to Safer Dating

Nearly 40% of all relationships begin online through an app or a website. Although the industry can bring so much joy to people, dating and meeting apps are prone to abuse. This abuse is unfortunately not unique to the category. Apps of all stripes, including the most popular games, the most popular social networks and ride sharing networks, suffer from similar issues. Bad actors troll other users, and they can be difficult to detect and to keep out. Our apps, unfortunately, are also not immune to these issues.

One meeting takes place every second across The Meet Group’s portfolio of apps, making user safety online and off an issue of paramount importance to us.

Over 16 million users send more than 800 chats every second across our portfolio, and tens of millions of minutes are livestreamed each day. To monitor this volume of content online, we use a combination of people, technology, and industry-leading abuse-reporting tools. In fact, we dedicate more than 350 full-time paid moderators, over half of our work force, to keeping unwanted content and users off our platforms.

More than 50 million photos and video screengrabs, along with other content, are reviewed each day by our moderation team and technology. Overall we find that fewer than 1% of our users violate our community standards. We take action on those that do, ranging from suspension to permanent removal from our platforms.

Though our products are primarily mobile applications, the issue of safety extends well beyond the confines of the mobile phone. This is why we also educate users about how to stay safe while meeting new people. According to a recent survey of our users, 88% of women say, as a precautionary safety measure, they make their friends and families aware of when and where they are going on a first date. A majority say they have brought along a friend or made sure a friend was within a close distance.

Reflecting on 2019, we’ve made great strides to improve safety for our users:

• Expanded our moderation team by more than 100 people
• Joined the board of the Online Dating Association
• Launched the most prominent abuse reporting buttons of any mobile livestreaming product
• Launched a safety pledge on MeetMe to have all users pledge to meet safely if they meet in real life (coming soon to the rest of the portfolio)
• Created a new Content and Conduct Policy, which we zealously enforce, and instituted full-screen reminders of these standards prior to every new livestream

The industry as a whole will be much safer when we collaborate to identify and implement solutions. As a leader in safety, we push forward standards and engage in discussion with other industry leaders. Earlier this month, I was in Berlin discussing key issues affecting the dating industry, including safety and moderation, with more than 20 members of the Internet Dating Excellence Association (IDEA), among them prominent companies such as Magic Lab (Badoo, Bumble), Spark Networks (Jdate, ChristianMingle, Zoosk, etc.), Happn, Muzmatch, and many others.

Following that meeting, The Meet Group was proud to be among the first crop of dating companies to receive the Social Safety badge from the same association. The badge represents acceptance of certain content and conduct guidelines that we believe the whole industry should embrace, but even more importantly, it demonstrates a pledge to put safety at the core of our business.

My goal is to collaborate with peers to prevent bad actors from popping up on Meet Group apps or other apps. At the start of the new year, I will be joining with other IDEA members again to discuss a number of items, safety remaining a top priority among them.

Looking ahead to 2020, there are a number of key problems we look forward to tackling:

• Authenticity: We plan to launch a Verified badge in 2020, and will seek to make it broadly adopted throughout our user base.
• Age Estimation: We are preparing to deploy the most proactive age estimation systems we are aware of in the dating industry.
• Device Blocking: We deploy certain third-party technologies today and are identifying even more advanced technology for 2020 to keep unwanted users off our apps. Authenticity combined with device blocking will enhance our ability to prevent abuse.
• Textual Screening: In our ongoing effort to improve our textual screening AI, we plan to evaluate third-party vendors against our in-house-developed solutions to proactively identify and block the many possible ways profane or bullying language can be expressed.

Safety is a complex problem that requires ingenuity, effort, collaboration, and commitment. We still have a lot of work to do, and this roadmap for 2020 is just one more step in the right direction. I believe it makes clear, though, that The Meet Group prioritizes nothing more than the safety of our members and staying at the forefront of dating-industry safety practices.

Dating industry executives at IDEA SUMMIT Europe 2019. Author pictured in bottom row, far right.

For more information on The Meet Group's safety practices, please visit https://www.themeetgroup.com/safety-meet-group/