What everyone gets wrong about the 2015 Ashley Madison scandal

It has been nearly a decade since hackers dumped huge amounts of personal data from Ashley Madison, the infamous dating site which, back in 2015, catered mostly to men who wanted to cheat on their wives. Now, that story is back in the media, partly because of a recent Netflix documentary about it.

You can see me in that series, a nerdy talking head in clips from various TV news shows from 2015, because I was one of the journalists breaking the story. But neither the Netflix series nor the handful of other documentaries still in the works get at what was truly revolutionary – and chilling – about the Ashley Madison affair.

Generally, the media has focused on the (mainly) men whose names and desires were taken from the company’s subscriber database and shared with the world. But that isn’t a new story. People have been trying to have affairs with strangers for thousands of years. Ashley Madison was never really about that. Avid Life Media, its parent company, wasn’t in the business of sex, it was in the business of bots. Its site became a prototype for what social media platforms such as Facebook are becoming: places so packed with AI-generated nonsense that they feel like spam cages, or information prisons where the only messages that get through are auto-generated ads.

After a rebrand, Ashley Madison is now owned by Ruby Life and bills itself as a spicy dating site for married people. But back then, it marketed itself as a social networking site for men seeking affairs with women. In late 2015, a group calling itself Impact Team got angry at the site and hacked into its servers. The group grabbed a bunch of user data and code, then posted it on Reddit with the claim that 95 per cent of the people on the site were men. I was intrigued. How could all those men be having affairs, if there were virtually no women on the site?

With the help of two hackers and a database expert, I decided to find out. What I discovered was a bizarre scam – though it was far more like Westworld than US reality show Cheaters. The company had systematically created an army of fake women, mostly very simple chatbots called engagers, who would flirt with men to lure them into paying for a subscription to the site. As I wrote in 2015, “it’s like a science fictional future where every woman on Earth is dead, and some Dilbert-like engineer has replaced them with badly-designed robots”. Back then, I repeatedly contacted Avid Life Media for comment, but it wouldn’t reply.

As we pored over the code, we found that, although there were a few human women on the site, more than 11 million interactions logged in the database were between human men and female bots. And the men had to pay for every single message they sent. For most of their millions of users, Ashley Madison affairs were entirely a fantasy built out of threadbare chatbot pick-up lines like “how r u?” or “whats up?”

There were real women behind the curtain, though. We found company emails in the data dump and discovered that Avid Life Media was also paying a small number of workers to generate fake profiles for more than 70,000 engager bots.

One of these workers sued the company in 2013, arguing that she had been required to type up so many fake profiles that she permanently injured her wrists (the lawsuit was dropped in 2015). It gets weirder: we found an internal email where employees discussed a tool they had built called fraud-to-engager, which automatically converted fraudulent profiles from other Avid Life Media sites into Ashley Madison bot profiles. “Should tweak it and rename it,” one employee suggested.

At the time, I was shocked by the sheer number of fake women. I wrote: “Instead of looking at Ashley Madison as a dating site, I think it’s more accurate to call it an anti-community—a hugely popular social site where it’s impossible to be social, because the men can’t talk to each other, most of the women are fake, and the only interaction available is with credit card payments.”

Nine years later, this could describe any number of social media sites that have become swamped with bots and AI-generated absurdity – and charge you for the privilege of interacting with techno-phantoms. Currently, Facebook is trying to figure out how to deal with millions of fake images generated by AI, while Google’s AI bot Overviews is telling users to glue cheese to pizza. The problem is, human beings are interacting with these AI images and suggestions, in some cases imagining they are engaging with real people.

It is like the whole world has become the Ashley Madison of 2015, and the more we want to talk to each other about it, the less likely we are to find a human to talk to.

Annalee’s week

What I’m reading

Renée DiResta’s Invisible Rulers, a brilliantly researched book about online disinformation.

What I’m listening to

404 Media’s weekly news podcast, showcasing investigations into the hidden depths of the online world.

What I’m working on

Eating biang biang noodles as much as possible on my book tour.

Annalee Newitz is a science journalist and author. Their latest book is Stories Are Weapons: Psychological warfare and the American mind. They are the co-host of the Hugo-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. You can follow them @annaleen and their website is techsploitation.com