It turns out that the initial analysis Gizmodo conducted into Ashley Madison, which appeared to show almost no real women on the site, was flawed.
But the research does suggest that there were thousands of robot programs impersonating women on the site, Gizmodo reporter Annalee Newitz wrote Monday.
The data dumped by a hacker group appeared to show a low number of women responding to messages on the site. For instance, it looked like only 1,492 of the women in the records released had ever opened their inboxes to check their messages on the site.
But with help from a couple security researchers, Newitz discovered these records weren't about real women at all. They showed bots pretending to be women, assigned to fake profiles that then-CEO Noel Biderman was apparently telling his staff to create in internal emails seen by Gizmodo.
That makes a lot more sense. If they weren't real in the first place but were only there to help convince men that there were lots of women on the site, of course they wouldn't spend a lot of time talking to the men.
The dump appears to show more than 70,000 fake robot profiles, almost all impersonating women.
What's unclear is whether any real women also used the site. In fact, the data dump doesn't contain enough information to determine whether or not there were real women signed up for the site.
But it does show that more than 20 million men on the site received email from these bots, and 11 million engaged in chat with them.
