Is Crowdsourcing a Puppet Show? Detecting a New Type of Fraud in Online Platforms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Crowdsourcing platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) are important tools for researchers seeking to conduct studies with a broad, global participant base. Despite their popularity and demonstrated utility, we present evidence that suggests the integrity of data collected through Amazon MTurk is being threatened by the presence of puppeteers, apparently human workers controlling multiple puppet accounts that are capable of bypassing standard attention checks. If left undetected, puppeteers and their puppets can undermine the integrity of data collected on these platforms. This paper investigates data from two Amazon MTurk studies, finding that a substantial proportion of accounts (33% to 56.4%) are likely puppets. Our findings highlight the importance of adopting multifaceted strategies to ensure data integrity on crowdsourcing platforms. With the goal of detecting this type of fraud, we discuss a set of potential countermeasures for both puppets and bots with varying degrees of sophistication (e.g., employing AI). The problem of single entities (or puppeteers) manually controlling multiple accounts could exist on other crowdsourcing platforms; as such, their detection may be of broader application. While our findings suggest the need to re-evaluate the quality of crowdsourced data, many previous studies likely remain valid, particularly those with robust experimental designs. However, the presence of puppets may have contributed to false null results in some studies, suggesting that unpublished work may be worth revisiting with effective puppet detection strategies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.025 | 0.148 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".