Is Crowdsourcing a Puppet Show? Detecting a New Type of Fraud in Online Platforms

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 However, the presence of puppets may have contributed to false null results in some studies, suggesting that unpublished work may be worth revisiting with effective puppet detection strategies.