After a disastrous stint at Twitter as the chief censor of the platforms infamous “trust and safety” team, Yoel Roth now plans to bring his censorship skills to a new task — cleaning up the seedy underbelly of online dating as Match Group’s head of trust and safety.
Wired reports that online dating giant Match Group has a new head of “trust and safety,” and he comes with plenty of baggage. Yoel Roth, fresh off a fiasco at Twitter that culminated in his abrupt departure, has landed a new job trying to keep romance-seekers safe on Match Group’s hookup apps including Tinder.
(Getty/ Joe Raedle)
Roth served as Twitter’s head of trust and safety until a few weeks into Elon Musk’s chaotic takeover, when he was essentially run off after being targeted by Musk himself and an embarrassing leak of internal communications. Now Roth will attempt to rehab his tarnished reputation by taking on scammers, predators and other bad actors infesting Match’s stable of dating sites and apps like Tinder, Hinge and OkCupid.
But the odds seem stacked against the formerly high-flying Roth. Match’s properties are plagued with fake profiles, financial fraud and even real-world crimes and violence linked to dating app meetups. In 2023 alone, several tourist deaths in Colombia were connected to Tinder. Roth faces an uphill battle.
“Every minute we remove about 44 spam accounts across our apps,” Roth admitted, exposing the whack-a-mole game Match is stuck playing against relentless scammers wielding the same advanced technologies and tactics. Even he confesses the company can never claim “mission accomplished.”
Roth plans to create uniform policies across Match’s dating empire and roll out new “protection functions” for vulnerable users. But dating apps present unique safety challenges since most communication happens in private chats that moderators cannot monitor.
With a limited track record in this space and a sullied reputation from Twitter’s censorship of conservatives, it remains to be seen if Roth can substantively make the sketchy dating scene any safer. Many view his hiring as little more than a desperate PR move by Match to counter its reputation for mishandling rampant fraud and abuse on its platforms.
Critics argue that until the company fundamentally reshapes its business model away from exploiting loneliness and insecurity through endless aimless swiping and expensive “premium” features, no amount of new trust and safety leadership can truly make dating apps any less risky.
Read more at Wired here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.