What everyone gets wrong about the 2015 Ashley Madison scandal
newscientist.com
newscientist.com
> 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?”
Taking it one step further: Apparently the millions of male users were unable to tell this site apart from any of the "legitimate" dating sites like Tinder.
For the male users, this site offered quite the same experience. You pay for attention, get a few chats full of dry "how r u"s and nothing further happens.
If there is enough value in basic chat bots for the people using that site, this is a sad state of affairs (pun fully intended).
There wasn’t enough value in the basic chat bots, the idiots using the site considered that basic chat as a prelude to IRL sex with a real woman, a goal tempting enough to presumably blinker them to how basic the chat was. All of which is to say: no value, 100% scam.
It’s the “just without knowing it” part that makes it the scam.
I just don’t buy that there were that many AM users thinking “this checks out with my prior experience in dating sites so it’s plausible”. They just weren’t thinking critically at all.
Men’s experience with women also varies a lot depending on how they look, and their social skills among other things.
If I recall the A.M. ads and site image correctly, it was also full of some hot woman with lush lips and skin showing, which is just an echo of the image men have in their minds, i.e., “I too can get that hot woman that the guy in fantasy world in the TV has”, when it was really even more than the journalist realized. It wasn’t just a bot farm, it was actually a male farm that harvested and monetized male dissociation from their environment and biological imperative.
Sounds like you're mixing it up with 420Dates :)
Now, flattening "doing bad things is bad" to "supporting police entrapment."
Beginning to think this is trolling.
If you tell an undercover cop that you have cocaine and you sell them a baggie of baking powder, you'll get arrested and charged with selling cocaine.
Obviously nobody was meeting with these chat bots physically. Real or fake, that is an important distinction.
And that they gave money to someone for what they thought was weed
I also don't interpret the other replies here to be saying the same thing as you. They're discussing the idea that getting caught trying to have an affair (that happens to be fake) has interesting parallels with getting caught trying to buy drugs (that happen to be fake). You're accusing the poster of trolling.
Looking at the other comments for a 3rd time, it's clear I'm not the only one expressing skepticism.
I can't find any more to discuss here, it would feel awkward sitting in a side thread, where no one else is engaging, scrapping over how to sort other people's comments. ex. people saying the follow up analogy is flawed doesn't say "I agree with jpohhhh", so someone looking to police here should feel they can validly.
And I don't like arguing with the cops, never goes well afaik :)
Same with the AM stuff, it doesn't really matter that my hypothetical SO was too dumb to notice they were talking to bots. Their intention was to cheat, and so the trust would be gone. At that point, how am I supposed to believe that they aren't cheating in other ways?
It brings to mind another thing that sometimes happens lately, where "prank" channels on YouTube or TikTok film themselves committing crimes, thinking that since they don't actually mean any harm, or say, are using fake weapons, it isn't a crime anymore. But, of course, it is a crime, the people who are being "pranked" in this manner believe they're actually in danger. There has even been a case where a prankster got shot for pulling a knife on someone as a "prank", and the shooter was found innocent because it was reasonable self defense.
You are right though, I believe others were scamming him too.
Casefiles has an excellent three-part podcast on it.
I mean we make countless bad decisions as humans, many of them rash last minute decisions in a time of desperation.
Given the ease of just making an account and talking to someone vs actually going through with something I feel like just being on a platform like this is villainizing what could have been a moment of weakness. But that doesn't mean that you would have gone through with it.
I would also put out there that there may be a decent subset of people that just the idea that someone might be into them without needing to actually do anything beyond that, is enough.
I fully acknowledge that there is a lot of nuance to this, but I would hope that as a society we could acknowledge a huge difference between a bit of fantasy/role playing and actually going through with something.
It's like flirting when your partner isn't around. It's bad (assuming it isn't something you've agreed upon), but if you stop it before it goes to far it's not as bad as going to bed with somebody.
While the long term intentions (infidelity) might be the same, social barriers prevent many people from taking it forward. Signing up on a website is something a lot of people do for a lot of things and making that the entry point to something exciting and forbidden is good marketing at best and psychological manipulation at worst.
For some (perhaps most) people, just creating an account and taking a peek is usually not enough to push them over but for many others, it's enough to start a chain reaction that will end up somewhere which will have real consequences for them and multiple people related to them. Not a good idea and a company that's making money off of this without even considering that is not very ethical in my estimation.
Especially if maybe they were just watching porn and briefly in a horny state wanted to check something out. Post nut clarity is a thing.
There is just such a large number of events and thought processes between a last minute rash decision to make an account somewhere and actually meeting up with someone, not the least of which is the time and effort to make it happen. To say just making an account is barely less bad than actually going through with cheating is... wild.
OTOH, the makers of the website have designed it to push people to do something that's likely very damaging just to sell a product. And then topped it off by lying about what they're selling.
Source? Don't recall this at all.
> it's treated...they were talking to real partners...presumably because that's...salacious
There's stigma against cheating that isn't mitigated by failing at it.
So the assumption should be that most of the real people on the site whether they are the man or the woman, are in a relationship with someone IRL but went to AM because they wanted to cheat.
They ask you about your relationship status so probably the leaked data can tell us how many reported being in a relationship vs not. (But also keep in mind people might lie about it, in either direction.)
My bare minimum relationship standard is a partner who does neither, and I hold myself to the same standard.
What I'm trying to say is, it's okay if the person you are responding to wants more strict boundaries than the rest of us. If flirting is cheating to them, then it is and that's that.
There IS an important distinction to be had between flirting and being friendly, though. Being friendly and even laughing at a joke is not flirting without the intent.
I think there were certainly lots of other people who were less world famous but prominent in their own businesses or communities. Wikipedia goes into it a little, and notes that there were at least two suicides following it. [2]
1. https://www.sportskeeda.com/us/shows/which-celebrities-expos...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_Madison_data_breach#Imp...
Many countries punish "attempted murder" (trying to carry out the act but failing, the same way people caught in this scandal attempted but failed at adultery) so it makes sense to me to not strongly distinguish between "tried cheating on their partner but failed" and "tried cheating on their partner and succeeded".
How would you think the conversation about AM would/should be modified, in light of the fact that people were (unknowingly) talking to chatbots instead of real partners? I think I already made my views clear, but I would actually like to hear other opinions since I don't think I understand any view but my own on this. Maybe other people would prefer the conversation is about spambots on social media websites instead of what the people on those sites tried to do?
Edit: nvm. I saw (after I was already done typing) the sibling comments to my current one, and that makes more sense.
Actually cheating has an additional negative consequence attached: potentially exposing your partner to disease and / or infection
Men need the illusion of the service having many women members in order to join & pay.
Therefore..
There are even a few niche ones where only the women can start a “match”.
Also, no mentions of Tinder in any of the other of this last 30 comments.
I also have to assume that a factor that would need to be investigated is whether it isn’t simply that people who met on tinder like telling people that for some reason, possibly because they are the transgressive, rotating door, “hookup culture” types that would have a proclivity for using something like Tinder.
I was not specific about when I asked or if it was unprompted. I qualify that the relationship has to have begun <10 years ago.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz4xx2rw0leo
there was less press that they had given up on the "women make the first move" paradigm just before that
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/30/tech/bumble-relaunch-men-make...
I am pointing out that this not the first or the last "dating" site to inflate female numbers with bots to keep men engaged.
So if you wanted to mess with someone, you could sign up their business email to Ashley Madison and have them receive regular notifications of "hot, married women in their area who are down to clown".
When LLMs and gen AI started to become somewhat competent, I began wondering if a TikTok style app with 100% "AI" generated content could be successful.
Most people here laughed at the idea, but reading things like this makes me think that it will become a thing.
One can say that Ashley Madison was a scam posing as a "dating" website (given the infidelity association) but the bigger story I think is that this describes all dating websites. It's just a question of degree.
For simplicity, I"ll speak in the heteronormative sense since this is the largest market. AM's tactics here of using fake profiles is a common tactic used by dating websites. Founders will argue this is to bootstrap the site, particularly because there tend to be more men than women on these sites. At what point does this rise to the level of being a scam? Remember that pretty much all these sites have paid features and subscriptions to send more messsages or likes or to raise your pfoile.
It's a common sentiment in the pharma world that there's money in the treatment but no money in the cure. This seems to apply here too. A "cure" here is your site's users find a long-term relationship and thus cease to be paying customers. As a business you want them to keep coming back.
AM was really just a headline-drawing hook on the model the pervades this space. "Have an affair" is just marketing. We love to extol the virtues of the "profit motive" but so often when you look at the details you see the company's interests and the user's interests not only don't align but are directly in opposition.
Keep telling yourself that to sleep soundly at night while scamming lonely people, Jesse.
So in a way, the site was _preventing_ men from cheating, since they mostly interacted with bots instead of real women.
Less likely, for sure, but far from impossible.
Emotional affairs are cheating and don't need to involve any physical contact.
If I was in a monogamous relationship and my partner was sliding into the DMs of married, high-profile, celebrities asking if they were DTF I'd consider it cheating regardless of how unlikely the possibility of amounting to anything physical was.
In any case, the tl;dr
- 95% of the site's users were men
- the company running the site made fake female profiles to interact with men: "how r u?", "what's up?" etc.
- men would pay to reply
The interesting part of Ashley Madison was that it was 100% a scam, and that scam was perpetuated by software and that it really wasn't anything special in its industry. Five years prior the time I owned a digital advertising agency and had a client company that owned a couple of dating sites. They both had identical business models - and it was really kind of preying on a weakness we all have: a desire for companionship and intimacy. They companies would milk people for a shocking amount of money to reply to their bots, and the bots even had product managers.
When I got to NYC on the other hand and attach to public WiFi often those localized ads are spot on to within a block.
I still find it surprising that this is new news as it has been the direction of different industries for a couple decades now.
Pretty much sums up AM's sales pitch.