Yoel Roth has spent the past 16 months recovering from a very bad, very public breakup.
For two chaotic weeks after Elon Musk took control of Twitter in October 2022, Roth clung on to his job as the platform’s head of trust and safety. He even won public praise from Musk for his “high integrity.” But Roth ended up walking away from the job that November, and he was quickly targeted with a torrent of harassment, driven partly by lurid accusations from Musk himself and also by “The Twitter files,” a dump of internal documents that revealed how Roth and other executives grappled with content moderation decisions.
Roth has kept busy consulting, teaching, and studying decentralized social networks (he now posts on Bluesky). Now, he’s getting back into what he has called the internet sanitation business, as the head of trust and safety at Match Group.
Match Group owns and operates a massive portfolio of dating apps around the world: Match, Tinder, Hinge, The League, OKCupid, BLK, Archer, Azar, Chispa, and more. Roth wrote his 2016 PhD dissertation on how gay culture, identity, and safety intertwine on location-based dating apps, with a focus on Grindr. You might say Roth’s new job is a good match.
Most discussions about online moderation revolve around open social platforms like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook apps, but toxic behavior happens on dating apps too, where most of the dialog happens in one-on-one chats. Scammers and fraudsters have fully infiltrated dating apps—not just Match’s apps but across the whole industry—and Match is in a constant race to use advanced technology to fight scammers wielding the same tools. People on dating apps have suffered real-life harm and violence after meeting up with potential dates. The Medellin Tourism Observatory in Colombia linked several tourist deaths to the dating app Tinder in 2023.
So Roth, who started his new role two weeks ago, will have his hands full, and it’s unclear how many other hands will be on deck to help him manage it. He spoke with WIRED about the challenges of keeping people safe inside dating apps, and how he thinks app stores should share that responsibility, in a conversation that has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Lauren Goode: I’m curious what your job search has been like, given how public your last role ended up being. How did you end up considering trust and safety in the dating app world?
Yoel Roth: Well, I spent the better part of the last year and a half really trying to think of where I can have an active role in trust and safety. Some of that was speaking about the work we did at Twitter, and writing about it. Some of it was teaching. Some of that was doing a bunch of research on federated and decentralized social media.
But then I went back to where it all started for me, 15 years ago, when dating apps were brand-new and Tinder didn’t exist yet. I was really interested in safety and privacy on these new services. I ended up writing my PhD dissertation on it. So when an opportunity to consult at the Match Group presented itself, I jumped at it. And then, we had a conversation around, “Should we DTR [define the relationship] and make this official and, like, go steady?” It’s not an exaggeration to say this is a dream job for me.
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