academia.edu might be lying to you

I received this email a few days ago from academia.edu.

And honestly, this screenshot might just say all there is to say about this topic, in which case I’d like to see academia.eu admit that they’re making up numbers and sending them to researchers as clickbait. Otherwise, I’d love to see an explanation — it is definitely possible that this is a simple database fuckup of sorts, or has to do with the somewhat weird way I filled out the demographic information.

Shoutout to “Anna” whom I owe receiving this email a few days later:

And to Schotz for his response on Twitter: