ABSTRACT
According to Newitz, "How angels are made" is a title for a long email thread where the developers and owners of the Ashley Madison site allegedly discuss the role and functions of social bots on the site. Newitz gives us a brief description of what bots in these discussions are: When men signed up for a free account, they would immediately be shown profiles of what internal documents call "Angels," or fake women, whose details and photos had been batch-generated using specially designed software. For Newitz, Ashley Madison's social bots are "fake women." Robert Gehl and Maria Bakardjieva trace the first definition of social bots in their stealthiness and capability of mimicking human beings. By their definition, the so-called humanness of these bots is achieved by mimicking other social media users or building an artificial intelligence that simulates human users on the site. Thus, Ashley's Angels were fake female and designed to lure (male) users of the site.
