Ashley Madison data reveals different things than we thought

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The original writer found that what she was counting was not actually the number of women on the site. It turns out that's not possible to work out. Buuuut...

It’s a lot weirder than that. Those columns in the data don’t record human activity at all. They record the last time a bot—or “engager” in Ashley Madison’s internal parlance—emailed or chatted with a member of the site.

What that means is that we have absolutely no data recording human activity at all in the Ashley Madison database dump from Impact Team. All we can see is when fake humans contacted real ones. In other words, the dramatic discrepancy between men and women is entirely because Ashley Madison’s software developers trained their bots to talk almost exclusively to men.

So the original count is wrong - 1,492 is the number of times a bot tried to chat with a woman. 20 million is the number of times a bot tried to chat with a man. They found about 70,000 female bots trying to chat up men on the site; and, strangely, 43 male bots chatting up women.

The entire site is fake women talking to actual men.

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