Employees of Mechanical Turk, a small-scale work platform at Amazon, say they've encountered paralyzed bodies, videos of botanical surgery and other child pornography. They were asked to provide Social Security numbers and other personal information. At one point their temporary supervisors, Amazon's "beggars", are said to be asking their anonymous employees to send in their underwear, take pictures of their feet, or even paint their own sex scenes. They say that they have been paid to recount the traumatic events in their lives – a cancer diagnosis, a major depression, or the death of a loved one – usually less than a dollar.
These are some of the 1st,100 answers two survey Gizmodo recently called gig workers on Mechanical Turk asking about their experience using the platform. Unlike the plight of the Amazon building workers, they never well written, the experiences of the gig staff at Mechanical Turk are a little obvious. Telling the stories of these differences, the anonymity of the staff can be difficult, which is why Gizmodo turns to the platform itself.
The first survey, conducted on Mechan Turk in December, asked staff (aka Turkers) about their unusual and very bad experiences on the platform. The second survey, which started in early January, asked about their experience working on Mechan Turk, direct and / or negative. In total, Gizmodo spent over $ 500 on that research.
We provided our contact information in our research to any Turker to reach us outside the platform, but no one did. And Mechan Turk's terms of service have prevented us from having to ask for their details. As a result, it was impossible for us to follow each claim. However, several similarities between the stories, and the breadth of experience, paint a strange, if not perfect, picture of living within this low-wage system of online workers.
At its core, Machine Turk (often referred to as Turk) is a marketplace for “small tasks” that are difficult for computers, such as labeling images or training the techniques used to measure content online. Because the platform provides access to large numbers of employees at low cost, Machine Turk often attracts academics and nonprofit organizations working on a budget or large tech companies who converge on the platform to train their testing tools.
The structure is simple: The applicant submits a job, known as HIT (Human Intelligence Task), to Mturk and puts a value of less than one cent per Micro-task. Employees can then choose to complete tasks that they feel are worth their time and effort. Both employees and applicants are technically Amazon customers, taking in all the work posted on the platform.
Responses to Gizmodo's survey paint a very high picture of the gig's economic life. Conversely, Turkers describes a platform where workers seem to have no way to pay the minimum wage, technical errors, or general harassment experienced by temporary managers, who say Amazon is often negligent. However, a large number of workers have expressed their appreciation for the work and flexibility provided by Mech Turk in a risky economy.
According to the same Web analytics Web service, the Mech Turk staff website had 536,832 visitors in December, giving an overview of how many people get a job through the platform. And as you can imagine, these people turned to Mech Turk for a variety of reasons, our surveys found. While most respondents gave no reason why they started using the platform, 10 percent said they used Machine Turk to supplement their income from another full-time or part-time job. Five percent indicated that they started with Mechanical Mechanics after being fired for another job. And 4 percent say they have a medical condition that prevents them from working full time.
"I love working with mturk …", one respondent wrote, "… I am disabled and therefore mturk restored my confidence, and I do not need to rely on my daughter for everything now, I managed to get Christmas presents for my older children." , "I cannot carry on a traditional job because of my health, but because of the expanding circumstances, I do not qualify for disability. So, when I got Mission Turk, it was Godsend. Mechan Turk allows me to work within my limitations, which helps in building my confidence. I know I'm not making money from doing this, but it's okay. It's better than nothing. "
For those who want to choose a side currency, the platform seems to be particularly effective. "My whole experience was great," replied one respondent. “I'm working full time as a teacher, so I do some extra research, but this will not make or break me. I'm professional and hopeless, so I don't use pens. ”One respondent, who described their Turk experience as“ optimistic ”said that they viewed the work as a supportive gig that" pays for my food, petrol money and money on a weekly basis, which saves me a lot of money from my regular work. "
In one survey, 38 percent of respondents felt very optimistic about the platform. "I love the Amazon Mechanical Turk. I have been working in Mturk for 5 years now," wrote the respondent. "My best experience is working from home on my pajamas and completing HITS whenever I want. . ”
Many Turkers say that they rely on the platform to be fully functional, but express a sense of hopelessness and prejudice, and non-payment has been a common complaint among respondents in our research. "I am disabled and have trouble finding or keeping another job, so for the most part this is all I have ever lived, and it is not enough," replied one respondent. They also added that, during the holidays, they feel fortunate to earn $ 5 a day ”and should“ rely heavily on friends to pay rent. ”They called the platform“ abusive ”and said that“ platforms like these, there are twists and turns of people who have no other option… It's sad, and it makes it hard to feel like it's worth getting up in the morning. ”
Worse than the minimum payment there is no charge. Hundreds of respondents reported at least one example of non-payment for their work. Depending on the answers to our research, this often happens in one of three ways: inappropriate rejection, apathy, or technical issues.
An improper refusal, reportedly by 14 percent of respondents, when the applicant resigned from the employee for no reason. When HIT is completed by Turker, the applicant has the opportunity to approve or reject the employee's input; as Documentation of Mechan Turk & # 39; s he subtly states, “When you allow an assignment, the employee is paid; when you refuse an assignment, the employee is not paid. "Because the applicant" can approve the results individually or all at the same time, & # 39; as Amazon explains, Turkers says it is possible for solicitors to leave the job after it is too late and pay the workers nothing while I can still access the data from the partially completed job. Amazon, on the other hand, pays a fee when work gets started on the platform.
Several respondents state that they have completed hundreds of HITs per applicant, investing their time, only when the applicant refuses all their work. "Employees have no right to appeal, and petitioners are able to say no to whatever they want," said one respondent. "This has had a negative impact on my approval level, and getting a job on this platform depends on a high degree of approval." After one employee was denied their HITS for no reason, they said, "I got my approval rating.… There is no blame for harming such employees."
At one point, workers claimed, they were not paid for negligence of the application. Because many educational researchers like to do research using platforms such as Qualtrics or Survey Monkey, Amazon supports HITs that link to external websites. However, in order for respondents to be paid, the platform needs to be able to match survey responses to external sites to the MTur staff, allowing them to obtain credit for completing the work. This is usually accomplished by giving the employee a code to complete the survey they can submit to Mech Turk once they have completed the survey.
The reality is that 20% of respondents reported incidents where, after spending hours on surveys, they were not paid because there was no code provided at the end of the investigation. As one respondent told us, "As long as the survey gets worse. They get all the information they need without paying and I spend my time and my work stolen. Amazon shouldn't let this happen to us."
Many employees say that the biggest rejection and this kind of negligence you ask are forms of fraud that allow solicitors to use free data without paying the employee the minimum wage they originally provided. Amazon may close a loophole that allows unpaid scams to operate by not allowing the activity prohibited by the requestor. But so far, at least, it has left that hole open.
"These are the lives of the people and it is a shame that the company is so profitable to treat us like this," one Turker said in response to one of our research.
Amazon did not respond to many of Gizmodo's requests for comment.
Turkers can “Report HITIf they believe the applicant has violated the rules. But employees also said Amazon was often slow and did not want to respond to complaints that they were being excluded from their salaries. "The thing I hate most about this scene away from Amazon is in the hands of everyone's bad behavior," said one respondent. "There is no commitment to the platform itself, Amazon is pleased to take (the) pie-stone and remain at the level where solicitors are complaining to loyal employees here." One respondent stated that "I have no way of getting help from Amazon, they do not care that the beggar is always right. This is my only source of income and I am afraid every day.
Even if the platform works as advertised, respondents say, employees are often treated with a lot of scary stuff, possibly because they tend to is a intelligence training exercise used to measure offensive content. In our second survey, 11 percent of respondents reported that their worst experiences on the platform involved seeing a very graphic image or video. For example, two respondents said they saw images of headaches, 10 responded to signs of animal abuse, 22 said they saw pictures of a serious car accident, and nine said they saw child pornography. "The worst I saw in Mechanical Turk was that people rated medical surgeries at much lower rates," the respondent said.
“I have to look at the faces of the people who shot and tried to kill themselves. They were misunderstood as a person. … I will never forget that face. It was scary and sick, ”said one respondent. “I have had HUGE photos with what looks like child porn, I hope the kids are old. I have no idea. "
Mechan Turk & # 39; s Acceptable usage policy, of course, it completely prohibits the distribution of child pornography or anything that shows unlawful sexual activity. Adult content is allowed as long as the title includes: "(WARNING: This HIT may contain adult content. Staff thinking is advisable.)" However, the employee said, "No warning that I will have to look at pictures like this, and pay for A QUICK . ”
While solicitors rely on MTurk staff to train content rating tools, Amazon seems to have difficulty managing its platform. The majority of respondents reported incidents such as unclear scars, breach of confidentiality, and other violations of the Metur Turk's acceptable use policy. While the policy explicitly states that the user "may not use, or otherwise encourage, the use of MTurk in any illegal, harmful, fraudulent, infringing, or defamatory activity," respondents cite a few examples of the work performed, in combination, violating each of the 18 principles Amazon identifies with its acceptable use policy.
For example, while the policy prohibits applicants from "collecting personally identifiable information," "trying to obtain any personally identifiable information," or "sending HITs containing personal information from a third party," many individuals are reportedly asked to submit personal information or record other people's details. According to one respondent, "I have seen HIT disclosing identity information for car dealers" including "SSN, home address and credit card numbers."
Amazon is making the Turkers possible contact the company to report allegations of violations of its rules, and it was unclear from the responses in our research to whether the employees did in each case described to Gizmodo.
While the definitions of the terms "dangerous" and "undesirable" apply correctly, a large number of respondents wrote about a unique experience when asked for personal information for interesting purposes. For example, four respondents told Gizmodo that they had been asked to paint their own sex scenes for unknown reasons, and more than a dozen respondents said they had been asked for pictures of their feet for an undisclosed purpose. As one employee tells, they once worked for an applicant who wanted “lots of pictures of my feet in different positions with socks and without socks.” Since the applicant never paid, never answered staff questions, but then received photos before finally doing the work, they concluded that HIT might be it was a state. "But I'm always wondering what happened to all those footage he collected."
While categorizing videos or images can be frustrating, many respondents say that completing a test can be very expensive. According to a 2016 Pew Research Center Report, more than 800 studies — ranging from medical research to social science — have been published using data from Mech Turk in 2015 alone. In fact, web traffic from Mechanical Turk to external survey providers such as Qualtrics shows that in the past six months Machine Mechan Turk has seen jobs at many universities including NYU, Columbia, Cornell, Stanford, and Yale.
Although there is some unusual research, 12 percent of respondents say that the worst or most bizarre experiences in Mechanical Turk are due to what can only be described as unpleasant personal requests when an employee reported being emotionally affected by a survey.
The work states that after completing a suicide-related survey, they had “very bad feelings,” even though it had been 10 years since they had been depressed, and one different Turker said they “cried” to remember the cancer diagnosis.
"Someone was paying me 50 cents to remember the worst memory of my life," recalls one respondent, "bothering me all day."
If you or someone you know is contemplating suicide, please call us How to Prevent Suicide in the National at 800-273-TALK (8255).