The Federal Government Is Threatening Dating Apps With Legislation

Popular online dating platforms like Tinder, Bumble and Hinge are being threatened with government regulation unless they improve safety for users.

The companies have until June next year to come up with a voluntary code of practice to improve their standards or the government will pull the regulatory trigger.

It follows on from an investigation by the Australian Institute of Criminology last year that found an alarming 75% of online daters had experienced some kind of sexual violence in the last five years. Unsurprisingly, women were found to most likely be at the receiving end of this.

Earlier this year, the federal government brought representatives from the sector face-to-face with experts, advocates and law enforcement agencies to discuss the situation.

On today’s episode of The Briefing, Antoinette Lattouf sits down with Intimacy and Dating App expert Lisa Portolan to discuss what we can expect and whether or not self-governance will be effective on dating apps.

In Australia, one women is killed per day by an intimate partner or a former partner or someone she has never met. So, we’ve got to looks at why these behaviours are happening in Australia and how we can deal with them in a systemic sort of way.

I think there is merit in giving the dating apps the opportunity to actually put this code together. Because I do think they understand the platforms and the behaviours that go on in the most intimate ways possible.

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