Website for Match.com. Photo: chrisdorney/Shutterstock.com

Jared Sine, chief legal officer for Match Group Inc., a Dallas-based firm that owns Match.com, Tinder, OkCupid and other online dating apps, spoke in favor of a controversial bill Wednesday that would hold tech firms liable for failing to prevent the spread of child porn on their platforms. 

The proposed bipartisan legislation, known as the EARN IT Act, "is a serious attempt to tackle big, complex societal issues created by the internet," Sine said during a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting. 

Describing the bill as a "call to action for all technology companies," Sine said in his testimony that he hopes "other executives will pause to realize the impacts of these realities on our children and resist the urge to retreat to their corner and use fear and recycled arguments to oppose this bill. 

"Because the consequences of doing nothing are both unacceptable and terrifying," he added.

Sine's appearance at the hearing comes in the wake of a Jan. 30 announcement that a House subcommittee was investigating Match and several other dating app firms for allegedly failing to prevent minors and registered sex offenders from using their services. 

"We don't want minors and bad actors on our apps, and we use every tool possible to keep them off," Match said in a statement. The company added that the "registered sex offender database needs to be updated so that a perpetrator's digital footprint can be tracked and blocked by our industry and all social media companies—particularly the ones that freely allow underage users on their platforms."

The EARN It Act would create a committee to establish "best practices" for preventing the publication and spread of online child pornography. Companies would have to show that they follow those to-be-determined practices in order to keep the liability protections they currently have under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

"If companies are worried about these standards, that worries me," Sine said. "Ultimately, companies should be taking it upon themselves to do this."

But Elizabeth Banker, deputy general counsel of the Internet Association, a Washington, D.C.-based lobbying group for major internet companies, raised concerns about the bill, including the possibility that it could be used to force companies to weaken or remove encryption protections for users' private communications. 

After hearing Banker's testimony, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, who introduced the bill with three other senators on both sides of the aisle, retorted: "All they care about is not getting sued," referring to tech giants that oppose the legislation. 

Earlier in the meeting, Graham argued that the current system under Section 230, which gives companies blanket immunity from liability for content that users upload to their sites, is not working. 

"It's become, in the minds of many, a joke," Graham said.

However, he noted that some companies have taken a more proactive approach to identifying and removing child abuse images from their sites. For instance, Facebook Inc. made more than 15.8 million reports of child exploitation in 2019, while Google made about 449,000 reports, according to Graham.

"Facebook is doing a damn good job of finding sexual abuse on their platform … the other sites, not so much," he said.  

According to Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Connecticut, Facebook has acknowledged that end-to-end encryption can, in fact, coexist with strong safeguards and enforcement against child sexual exploitation. 

Like Graham, Blumenthal suggested that the big tech firms pushing back against the legislation are more concerned about losing Section 230 liability protections than they are about encryption and privacy.  

During the hearing, the mother of a child who was sexually abused testified that images of the abuse are still being circulated more than a decade after the crime. Those images have been found in nearly 170,000 files in the possession of thousands of offenders. 

"How can these images continue to be uploaded and shared … without the companies doing anything?" she said.