Dating apps can facilitate friendships, relationships, and other connections, but they can also be sites of risk, harm, and violence. While platform policies and associated documents outline duties and protections offered to users, platform governance can embed carceral forms of justice enacted through surveillance and punishment. Through a comparative study of 30 dating apps’ safety materials, we identified three themes reflecting carceral logic in dating app governance: individualization of user safety; policing through peer moderation and reliance on law enforcement; and surveillance-based features encouraging users to exchange their data for perceived protection. These approaches frame harm as an individual failure, ignore systemic violence, promote punitive responses to justice, and risk exacerbating users’ vulnerability to privacy violations. We recommend that dating apps adopt alternative models of justice centered on users’ existing safety strategies, mutual accountability and responsibility, and build in mechanisms that afford transparency and user autonomy in choosing safety mechanisms that can be adapted according to the differential risks users face.
Dietzel et al. (Wed,) studied this question.