Online Dating Platform Safeguards and Self-Protection: How Dating Platforms Characterise, Respond to, and Safeguard Against Harms
Published in CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2025
Recommended citation: O'Brien, C. R., Roslan, N. A., Murdoch, S. J., Abu-Salma, R., Zytko, D., & Warner, M. (2025, April). Online Dating Platform Safeguards and Self-Protection: How Dating Platforms Characterise, Respond to, and Safeguard Against Harms. In Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-8). https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3706599.3719825
Our findings reveal the challenges of balancing platform accountability and user responsibility for safety, particularly as the goal of these platforms is for users to meet in-person. Platforms utilise proactive moderation tools and educational resources to enhance safety, yet many of these resources shift the burden of safety onto users. Moreover, we highlight the paradox of self-protection tools that both mitigate and enable harm, as well as identify inconsistencies in safeguarding provisions, for different geographic regions and marginalised groups.
Recommended citation: O’Brien, C. R., Roslan, N. A., Murdoch, S. J., Abu-Salma, R., Zytko, D., & Warner, M. (2025, April). Online Dating Platform Safeguards and Self-Protection: How Dating Platforms Characterise, Respond to, and Safeguard Against Harms. In Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-8).