COLLABORATING OUR WAY TO SAFER DATING
To further its leadership in safety, The Meet Group collaborates actively with industry partners, peers, NGOs, and law enforcement. The company takes a hands-on approach to user safety and speaks on the topic all over the world. Most recently, The Meet Group presented in Berlin at the IDEA SUMMIT Europe. The company also plans to lead a webinar for Safer Internet Day on February 11th and to present at both the Internet Dating Excellence Association’s (IDEA) event on March 6th and the Global Dating Insights conference on March 10th.
There are various factors that indicate high standards of excellence within trust and safety. The Social Safety badge from the Internet Dating Excellence Association, or IDEA, is only for qualified members such as The Meet Group that “pledge to strive towards being at the forefront of safety standards and best practices for moderation and enforcement.” Badgeholders have adopted and incorporated the Social Safety Conduct and Content Guidelines, providing a safe environment for users to interact and connect. The badge helps users identify apps that certifiably make user safety their number one priority:
Industry Wide Safety Advances
The Online Dating Association, or ODA, just launched a Safety First campaign in the UK and US. This is an unprecedented step for the UK-based organization to extend their trust and safety efforts internationally. Best practices are shared among service providers with a Framework for User Safety, with partners providing:
- Prominently displayed advice and guidance on how to enjoy services and dating safely
- Profile and content monitoring
- Safe messaging systems and other mechanics for blocking scammers
- Restrictions keeping those under 18 off dating services
- Reporting mechanisms in the event of problems
One way The Meet Group integrates the Framework for User Safety is through our 3-step Safety Pledge process, which inhibits app usage until users agree to our safety guidelines. Users are required to “pledge” to follow each safety guideline in order to access to the app’s features.
This pledge is prominently displayed to each new MeetMe app user and we plan to make it available on our other apps soon. It is important to keep these advisories front-and-center, actionable, and visible to our community.
Partnering To Strengthen Safety
The Meet Group collaborates with industry leaders to stay one step ahead of bad actors and to address common challenges, including: user verification, age estimation, and textual analysis. In January 2020, we were proud to be part of the announcement of Project Artemis: an unprecedented text-based, anti-grooming solution that detects problematic language in real time, allowing moderators to take more expedient action towards identifying and removing bad actors. We worked with Microsoft and others to pioneer Project Artemis, and it is now freely available to qualified organizations through THORN.
The Meet Group also shares best practices and collaborates actively with other safety-focused organizations. For example, we have more than 500 paid moderators, as well as advanced AI and algorithmic processing to police our streams, and we actively report relevant abuse to NCMEC. Additionally, at our cost, we collaborate with Family Watchdog to block attempted registrations from registered sex offenders and to continually scrub our user base against sex offender registries. We also are pleased to have recently been invited to join the WePROTECT Global Alliance, which counts 22 of the largest global technology companies as members.
The Meet Group recognizes that to achieve our vision of meeting the universal need for human connection, we must collaborate on safety practices, moderation, and education across our apps. To further our commitment to continuous improvement, we are willing to work with competitors and other industry members in an effort to develop new safety tools and technologies designed to protect and safeguard our communities.
Originally published at https://medium.com on February 7, 2020.
