How and Why Big Dating is Silencing the KATIA Project

Earlier this year, the Todd and Clare network announced our support for an evidenced-based, anti-Violence Against Women initiative called the KATIA Project that aims to protect American women.

If you’ve been following the progress of KATIA and wondering why it has received no news this year, here’s the answer: The big dating sites do not want any form of public debate. Like many industries today, the dating industry is controlled by a small group of giant companies who enjoy the lion’s share of buying media coverage, and who have share prices and reputations connected with efforts to stop anything negative from reaching any audience whatsoever.

The KATIA Project is being railroaded into obscurity because it shines a light on the unlawful violence many women using online dating websites have experienced.

Most small American businesses, like T&C Network Solutions, are not equipped to handle this type of ostracism. Moreover, educated public are used to only hearing about this type of Kafkaesque context, in relation to big business through outlets like the Guardian. For example in cases like Trafigura’s secret gag orders on UK press, suppressing the reports about their dumping of toxic waste in Africa that was eventually exposed by Wikileaks.

3 months ago, our office would have said it was unthinkable that publicly-listed dating businesses could have the same, extraordinary, silencing effect on journalists’ reporting of an anti-rape campaign.

But the analogy is fair. And a reality for KATIA.

The effectiveness with which these conglomerates (who own the entire conversation about dating in mainstream media) have managed to effectively sideline and marginalize all of KATIA’s public relations efforts, speaks to the heart of democracy in America. KATIA is pause for us all to think about press freedom and the power with which Washington lobbyists protecting large company interests can infringe upon independent initiatives to protect women online.

For those who’ve never heard of KATIA (which unfortunately is still most people), the KATIA project deals with an extremely sensitive and highly controversial subject matter. It is essentially a mathematics tool developed by a group of U.S. based experts. KATIA enables women and moms to avoid dating (and being lured by) sex offenders in all realms of their lives, by pre-matching males’ faces with national crime database photos.

Some folks have mentioned Spielberg’s film, Minority Report, when they first hear about KATIA. But the tool is not science fiction; it is a credible, evidence-based software that is written in R language and that benefits from the input of a Google engineer and Notre Dame mathematician.

Every day, KATIA helps its many third-party female users, many of whom are college women, to stay safe online. Vitally, KATIA also shields those women who choose to run rape screens, and who have a right to remain anonymous, by legally protecting their data.

T&C Network Solutions Involvement to Date

While we believe the vast majority of men are lawful and safe daters, research as recent as February 2016 continues to show there is a risk posed to women by a small proportion of sex offenders who are able to successfully use dating sites, of all sizes, to abuse vulnerable females.

Scott Drotar, a University of Notre Dame mathematician, is one of KATIA’s developers who has bravely started a Change.org petition to Congress to call upon the government to do more to protect women online.

Out of a sense of responsibility and Christian duty, as dating site owners, we agreed to financially sponsor the project. Anything which protects our female members makes business sense to us.

So far, T&C Network Solutions has contributed significant amounts of time and money to the project’s research and development, and web infrastructure, and our own female members benefit from free-usage of the KATIA tool.

Moving Forward Towards a Fairer Media Representation

One could be forgiven for believing there was a press moratorium on the KATIA Project. Neither us, Scott, or anyone at KATIA expected the sophisticated and multi-dimensional media blocking with which the large dating sites have been able to use their contacts in both Washington, D.C., and media, to keep KATIA out the news.

This week we were tipped off that an (unnamed) investigative journalist who I spoke with earlier this year at Buzzfeed News about the project, is himself an unofficial paid representative of one of the large dating sites which is aggressively looking to shut down KATIA anyway they can.

Unbelievably crass and insensitive, that Buzzfeed journalist who interviewed Mr Drotar, told us in writing he believed rape “is a very cool story,” quoting him in context and verbatim. He wanted us to give up the identities of some of KATIA’s anonymous female users–something which because of rape’s stigma, we found an obscene request. The Buzzfeed journalist obfuscated our words when we told him we found his malicious approach toxic.

The seriousness of this type of male lack of concern is not to be underestimated. Every 6 minutes, another woman is raped in America with a backlog of untested rape kits that grows by the week. Thanks to all Obama’s empty promises and the lack of action by the current administration, our next president will inherit an unenviably massive task to make the streets safer for women and bring justice to female rape survivors.

And while reporting on KATIA is being deliberately restricted, more women will suffer from not having access to the rape screens ability to warn them about dangerous sex offenders.

Already another internationally-reported courtcase looms involving one of the dating companies we are complaining about, and one of their female users who was allegedly thrown to her death off a building in Australia by a man she met off their dating website.

It’s not difficult to see why these big dating companies do not want KATIA to have any publicity anywhere in our country.

Crunchbase deleted our profile as soon as KATIA launched so no investors can find us: Unsurprisingly, big dating sites not only control the conversation about online dating, but also the flow of venture capital money through the industry too.

And since statistically due to their size those big sites are where women are most at risk from online predators, it’s sad that their users—the women who urgently need to use KATIA (or similar background screens) to protect themselves from being raped and abused online—are being stopped from even finding out about the tool from their own member sites.

~TH

(NB: Blog posts marked TH are authored by Todd Hammond. All other posts are written by our female staff.)