The Platform Question: Power, Accountability and Global South The Platform Question: Power, Accountability and Global South 143. ibid; Emily Elena Dugdale and Hanisha Harjani, ‘Dating App Cover-Up: How Tinder, Hinge, and Their Corporate Owner Keep Rape Under Wraps – The Markup’ (13 February 2025) <https://themarkup.org/investigations/2025/02/13/ dating-app-tinder-hinge-cover-up> accessed 19 August 2025. 144. ‘Digital Services Act: Transparency report’< https://bumble.com/en-us/help/ transparency-report> 145. Article 15 of the Digital Services Act also lays down mandatory transparency reporting requirements for all intermediaries (except MSMEs that are not VLOPS/VLOSEs). 146. Article 24(5) of the Digital Services Act mandates online platforms to submit “statements of reasons” for their content moderation decisions to the EC to be included in a publicly accessible machine-readable database. See EC, ‘Digital Services Act Transparency Database’ <https://transparency.dsa.ec.europa.eu/> accessed 16 December 2023. 147. Code of Practice 2024 <https://www.australianonlinedatingcode.com. au/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Australian-Voluntary-Code-for-Online-Dating-Services-Code-of-Practice.pdf> . 148. Similar to the reporting obligations under the DSA, dating platforms must provide aggregate statistics information on the number of accounts terminated, classified by the policy violation. The reports must also provide disaggregated information on the content moderation undertaken by platforms classified by mechanism of detection and enforcement action. They must provide information on the platform’s own content moderation initiatives, including the type of measures that impact the availability, visibility and accessibility of user-generated information. The report must also contain information on the use of automated technology (including qualitative description, purpose, accuracy and error rates). Dating platforms must also disclose the training and assistance provided to human content moderators. See Code of Practice 2024, para 8.4. 151. See ibid; Arvind Narayanan, ‘Twitter Showed Us Its Algorithm. What Does It Tell Us?’ (Knight First Amendment Institute, 10 April 2023) <http://knightcolumbia.org/blog/twitter-showed-us-its-algorithm-what-does-it-tell-us> accessed 29 August 2024; Paddy Leerssen, ‘The Soap Box as a Black Box: Regulating Transparency in Social Media Recommender Systems’ (24 February 2020) <https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3544009> accessed 14 June 2023. 152. Data access for researchers is one of the most significant accountability mechanisms for social media platforms. See Naomi Shiffman and Brandon Silverman, ‘The Case for Transparency: How Social Media Platform Data Access Leads to Real-World Change’ (Social Science Research Network, 7 May 2025) <https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=5245757> accessed 2 September 2025. The Digital Services Act also mandates Very Large Online Search Engines and Very Large Online Platforms to grant data access for vetted researchers. See Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 19 October 2022 on a Single Market For Digital Services and amending Directive 2000/31/EC (Digital Services Act) <https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ TXT/?uri=celex%3A32022R2065>. 153. Historically, social media platforms have also voluntarily submitted themselves to audits like the GNI Company Assessments See, Global Network Initiative, ‘GNI Assessment Toolkit’ (October 2021) <https://globalnetworkinitiative. org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/AT2021.pdf> accessed 30 May 2024. For more on Algorithmic audits, see Christian Sandvig and others, ‘Auditing Algorithms: Research Methods for Detecting Discrimination on Internet Platforms’ (2014) 22 Data and discrimination: converting critical concerns into productive inquiry 4349;‘Why We Need to Audit Algorithms and AI from End to End’ (AlgorithmWatch, 1 October 2024) <https://algorithmwatch.org/en/auditing-algorithmsand-ai-from-end-to-end/> accessed 29 January 2025. 149. ‘Dating Apps Move to Friend Zone in Search of Profits’ The Economic Times (14 November 2024). <https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/ international/business/dating-apps-move-to-friend-zone-in-search-of-profits/ articleshow/115287860.cms?from=mdr> accessed 22 August 2025;My Story of Building India’s Leading Dating App, Quack Quack : Ravi Mittal (Directed by Wealth Lessons Club, 2021) <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-gJthgOslg> accessed 2 September 2025. 150. See Mike Ananny and Kate Crawford, ‘Seeing without Knowing: Limitations of the Transparency Ideal and Its Application to Algorithmic Accountability’ (2018) 20 New Media & Society 973 <https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816676645> accessed 28 February 2023 72 Platform Accountability in Online Dating Platform Accountability in Online Dating 73