- Gizmodo editor-in-chief Annalee Newitz ran a number of tests to discover 31 million of the accounts belonged to men while 5 million supposedly were linked to females. 10,000 of the accounts were created with the Ashleymadison.com e-mail, implying they were test subscriptions. 9,000 of them were linked to actual females.
-Newitz also stated "What I discovered was that the world of Ashley Madison was a far more dystopian place than anyone had realized. This isn’t a debauched wonderland of men cheating on their wives, it isn’t even a sadscape of 31 million men competing to attract those 5.5 million women in the database. Instead, 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... When you look at the evidence, it’s hard to deny that the overwhelming majority of men using Ashley Madison weren’t having affairs. They were paying for a fantasy."
-"Overall, the picture is grim indeed," Newitz concluded. "Out of 5.5 million female accounts, roughly zero percent had ever shown any kind of activity at all, after the day they were created. Ashley Madison employees did a pretty decent job making their millions of women’s accounts look alive. They left the data in these inactive accounts visible to men, showing nicknames, pictures, sexy comments. But when it came to data that was only visible on to company admins, they got sloppy.... Either way, we’re left with data that suggests Ashley Madison is a site where tens of millions of men write mail, chat, and spend money for women who aren’t there."
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