Dating app safety shouldn't be left to women, researchers say

Dating app harms fuel calls to extend digital duty of care to platforms In short: Almost all women surveyed in a new Australian study reported encountering harmful behaviour on dating apps, with many taking their own precautions to stay safe. Researchers say platforms should do more to prevent systemic risks as the federal government considers a digital duty of care. What's next? Consultation on Labor's proposed digital duty of care closes on Tuesday, with advocates saying it has capacity to curb online abuse. Women are being forced to act as their own safety system on dating apps where experiences of sexual harassment, manipulation and controlling behaviours are widespread, a study has found. Australian researchers found 99 per cent of heterosexual women surveyed had encountered at least one harmful behaviour on a dating app in the previous three months. Unsolicited explicit messages, attempts to monitor activity, love bombing, negging and gaslighting are common experiences on dating apps, according to the study released on Tuesday by the Minderoo Foundation-funded Behaviour Insights Team (BIT). Women reported routinely screening profiles for warning signs, withholding identifying information and carefully managing interactions to protect themselves from potential harm. These accounts have fuelled calls to ensure a proposed digital duty of care was implemented to require online services to tackle systemic risks. Researchers have argued the scale of the problem showed women could not be expected to manage the risks alone, with dating platforms better placed to prevent harm before it occurred. Women coaching each other to stay safe Brisbane resident Rebecca Wilson, 33, said her harmful dating app experiences have included receiving "completely unsolicited" and "aggressively sexual" messages, photos and videos. Ms Wilson said she was also once stalked by a man she had met via an app. "We went on one date. I said to him, 'Look I'm just not interested anymore', and he didn't get the message," she said. "Weeks later he kept popping up at the same places as me … following me around. "He touched me at a bar right in front of my friends when it was clearly unsolicited." With only minimal information on the man, Ms Wilson said she could not easily report him to authorities. One issue was that using the "block" feature on the app meant she lost the ability to collect identifying material to progress a complaint. "There's no way of being able to know the identity of who you were talking to," Ms WIlson said. Ms Wilson said she and her friends have "coached" each other through how to navigate online dating safely. "The current mechanisms are really just not enough on these apps," she said. Harmful behaviour 'normalised' The most common harmful behaviours on dating apps were psychological and emotional, which were encountered by 95 per cent of the 1,008 women across Australia surveyed for the BIT study. About 89 per cent experienced monitoring and surveillance activity and 88 per cent reported being sent unsolicited sexual images and videos, and being pressured and manipulated into sending sexual content. Almost six in 10 women reported fear-based controlling behaviour, including threats of physical harm. Of those, only about 22 per cent reported those threats to the platforms. Among women who made reports to platforms generally, about 19 per cent felt their complaint was "barely" or "not at all" taken seriously, while 64 per cent said they were taken at least "somewhat" seriously. Lead researcher Karen Tindall said the findings showed there was a need for greater efforts by the platforms to tackle "genuinely preventable risk". "Right now, a lot of these behaviours are so normalised that women blame themselves or they think they are overreacting," she said. "This data and research should validate women's experience and should shift the conversation toward fixing the system itself." Dr Tindall said there were features built for safety that could lead to harm, such as preventing screenshots to prevent against image-based abuse. "But that also removes a woman's ability to document what happened," she said. "I'm not saying those safety features should be removed, but it means that safety features need to be tested for how they will be worked around, and whether they will work as intended." Duty would shift responsibility onto platforms The findings have been released as the federal government consults on its proposed digital duty of care, which is intended to require services to identify and mitigate foreseeable risks rather than relying on users to report harm after the fact. The draft duty for adults could apply to dating platforms on which users have faced serious abuse, stalking, sexual violence or image-based abuse. It would mean services were required to identify and mitigate systemic risks that could enable such conduct. While the initial debate has focused on social media, the proposed duty would apply more broadly across digital services, including dating and messaging apps, online games, search engines and AI services. Minderoo Foundation gender equality executive director Jacqueline Joudo Larsen said a digital duty of care could prevent harm and protect Australians. "It is the single biggest lever to curb the reach, scale and speed at which abuse is occurring by shifting responsibility from individuals to companies that are designing and operating online platforms," she said. "This is a standard that we hold other sectors to and it should be no different for the online space." Ms Larsen said technology had "transformed" how people met, connected and built relationships. "Those benefits are very meaningful," she said. "But safety cannot be the price women pay for participation. "This is a design problem that's entirely preventable." Ms Larsen said Australia could be a leader in tech safety and, if it was serious about ending sexual and domestic violence, that was an "opportunity we can't squander". Labor's proposal under scrutiny Submissions on Labor's proposal close on Tuesday and draft legislation will likely be introduced next month. The Coalition has criticised the draft, primarily due to concerns over discretionary powers allowing the minister to add additional "harms" for children and "serious harms" for adults. In a social media post shared by Opposition Leader Angus Taylor, the Coalition dubbed the idea the "Albo-rithm" and suggested the government would seek to censor online spaces. But Communications Minister Anika Wells has repeatedly said the intent of the rule making power was about acting with "urgency" if new threats, such as apps that allowed users to "nudify" photos, arose online. "We think this is a sensible measure to try and deal with these emerging harms that are coming online every single day," she said earlier this month. The discretion in the bill for adding additional harms would be disallowable by the Senate at any time, but Labor might have to make some changes to their plan in order to secure the Greens' support for the draft bill. In another submission to the draft legislation, the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman has described the reforms as a "rare opportunity" to build trust and accountability into the digital economy from the outset. Ombudsman Cynthia Gebert said trust would not be built by hoping companies did the right thing and urged the government to consider an independent external dispute mechanism for when system failures occurred. "Everyday Australians need someone to turn to for support holding big tech companies accountable when they get things wrong and we stand ready to help," she said. The submission said an external complaints system would provide a "practical avenue" for Australians to resolve issues such as restoration of account access, ensuring choices about algorithms are implemented and reconsidering incorrect decisions.