Amazon's Mechanical Turk has fallen prey to social media spammers and it is now full of requests to spam bookmarking services for pennies per link. Although these HITs may stop short of being "fraud" in the legal sense of the word, they are certainly dishonest and unsavory. In addition to these spam bookmarking requests, we're also seeing HITs for Diggs, Stumbles, Slashdots, etc. of spammers' web pages and web sites.
In case you're unfamiliar, Amazon's Mechanical Turk is a crowdsourced marketplace for tasks. A person needing work done can set up a HIT (human intelligence task) - the small job they need done. Others come along to perform the HITs, earning micro payments along the way. In this way, businesses, developers, and other individuals have access to an affordable, scalable workforce
Unfortunately, it appears that the convenience of the Turk marketplace has some appeal to social media spammers, who are now using the site to earn Diggs, bookmarks, and other social recommendations they do not deserve. Here's an example:
Photo courtesy of Brynn Evans
Anyone who uses Amazon's Mechanical Turk has no doubt come across similar HITs posted by spammers. For example, this guy is requesting someone create 29 social bookmark accounts from 29 sites:
A search for "bookmark" on MT today displays 48 results (at the time of writing) where spammers are requesting social bookmarking of their web site. Search for "digg" and you'll find people paying for Diggs.
Of course, whenever there is a system in place (like social media) that can help drive traffic to a web site, there will be those people who use it to generate traffic for their spam sites. But why are they able to use Amazon Mechanical Turk to do so? Shouldn't Amazon police the Turk to shut down these spam accounts?
However, this doesn't mean that Mechanical Turk doesn't hold any value - it's still an innovative and useful tool for many. In fact, members of the HCI community (Human Computer Interaction) have begun to use Turk for user research studies with great success. This work has inspired others like open source advocate, Chris Messina, to do the same. He plans to use Turk for usability studies on OpenID and OAuth. Since the HITs are spread out among many, the cost of performing these studies is greatly reduced. Being able to crowdsource research is a great way that MT can be used today, and one that will have a big impact on the future, too.
Thanks to Brynn Evans, a graduate student in the Department of Cognitive Science at University of California, San Diego for discovering this and thanks to open source advocate Chris Messina for sending it along to us.
Comments
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i saw brynn post this yesterday. i think it's about time to say something to people like this. i work for mister-wong.com and i can tell any one considering social bookmarking for money, that they will not earn anything. their accounts will be picked up in spam filters. and to those spammers offering this kind of thing, they need to stop.
in the past week or so, i have twittered and pownced several times about how i regularly get contacted by seo people (the spammer kind) and other spammers. they ask me for tips on how to spam mister wong, they ask for link exchanges, etc. and oddest of all, quite a lot of them hit on me. i don't want to be spammed or hit on. and it always amazes me, that they didn't take the 2 seconds to notice in my profile who i am.
i really hope mturk will put a stop to this kind of thing, because it's not good for them. they have a great service and i hate to see it blemished by spammers as well.
Posted by: tinythoughts | August 29, 2008 9:35 AM
Mechanical Turk is an excellent idea.
For Amazon to 'censor' posts would set a terrible precedent.
And seo guys build links all the time. To simply suggest from viewing only the MT posting their site is spam is like saying John McCain or Barak Obama will make a good president.
It's premature to say the least. We need more data.
Only by clicking through and seeing these websites and whether they provide value can you know whether they're spam or not.
But since MT is a marketplace for people to post paying jobs Amazon should not censor (and probably financially doesn't have the incentive).
Posted by: alexander alaric | August 29, 2008 9:45 AM
I saw it comming, next it will be used to break captchas
Posted by: Arturo Servin
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August 29, 2008 10:32 AM
If you've ever been on there, this isn't news. I had to report a guy that was trying to eat through a competitor's adsense budget. Paying for social bookmarking is not really fraudulent compared to that
Posted by: David Knight
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August 29, 2008 10:35 AM
Turk will always have the potential to be abused by someone. I think turks alone are smart enough to pick out craptastic jokers who are trying to abuse the service. We assume they are clueless and just hungry for money and clearly they are far smarter than anyone would like to give them credit for.
That social network spammer task has been up there for awhile now, and it hasn't been picked up by anyone, the HIT requestor is only looking for 1 person to do it, and no one has taken the bait, not even at $5. The community of turk is saying no.
I don't think Amazon should police the system.
Mechanical Turk light side far outshines its dark and dismal doom side. It really has a ton of potential if you ask the right questions, and reward turks properly. But in the end since humans interact with it, you're always going to find someone who wants to abuse the playground. Perhaps they should go to http://www.greedypeople.com
Meanwhile I'll continue to work on various experiments using Mechanical Turk.
http://www.slideshare.net/koovus/5-dollar-data-updated/
Posted by: dan | August 29, 2008 10:36 AM
I guess Amazon can post a Mechanical Turk request for someone to be paid to find and mark such fraudulent requests :)
Posted by: Esdee | August 29, 2008 12:14 PM
I don't really see a problem.
Compare to viral marketing tactics where people are paid to wear or use products and then promote them socially.
It's a free world. Let them do what they want.
Posted by: Mike | August 29, 2008 12:59 PM
Mechanical Turk's terms of service specifically disallow any HITs that require a turker to create or have an account on another site, and this sort of linkspamming is certainly in violation of the spirit of Turk, which they've used in the past to take down HITs.
Turk is very cheap, but the value is yet to be really proven. It's sort of interesting that there are a couple of research studies that the Turk audience is appropriate for, but it's not useful for a really broad audience.
Posted by: Thomas | August 29, 2008 3:22 PM
@dan Unfortunately, I think your logic about the turker community not taking the "bait" is inaccurate. There are tons of requesters posting for people to bookmark websites, create new accounts, etc. Undoubtedly they are looking for hundreds of turkers to complete these tasks, BUT the task is only listed as "1 HIT available." Only 1 HIT is available to *you* as the single turker---it's viewable as "1 HIT available" to every worker on MTurk, though. You cannot know whether the community is saying no based on this display.
Whether these "fraudulent" HITs are surprising or not, it is disheartening when many other requesters are using MTurk for more reputable tasks.
Posted by: Brynn Evans | August 29, 2008 4:08 PM
Sarah:
Thanks for referencing our work in the HCI field. Our recent work on MT show that the Mechanical Turk community is more resilient than most people will believe at first glance.
I saw these tasks, but I am not sure the economic incentives are there for someone to complete the tasks. Turkers are not just motivated by money---they're also motivated by how fun the tasks are.
Posted by: edchi.myopenid.com
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August 29, 2008 4:09 PM
Question about this post: You say that members of the HCI community have begun to use Mturk for user research. Can you say more about that? I haven't heard of it (and I'm in the HCI community).
Posted by: Nick | August 30, 2008 12:14 AM
@nick
The HCI angle is still pretty new on turk. Best results vary between how you structure your questions, mixing quant and qual methods and getting your compensation down correctly, but people are using it for research. On the research angle of turk, it starts here:
http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/search/label/mechanical%20turk
and then go here
http://doloreslabs.com/examples.html
and last but not least, this article got me to post some data from a recent small study I did the other day on what makes turkers tick
http://www.floozyspeak.com/blog/archives/2008/08/valley_of_the_t.html
Posted by: dan | August 30, 2008 2:43 AM
"I don't really see a problem.
Compare to viral marketing tactics where people are paid to wear or use products and then promote them socially.
It's a free world. Let them do what they want." I agree 100%. Sounds like people are trying to become Internet Police?? What is this, China?
Posted by: JIm | August 30, 2008 9:20 AM
Dude that is totally insane. Why do people constantly cry, bicker, piss and moan about everything?
Whistler
www.FireMe.To/udi
Posted by: Jason Wilder | August 30, 2008 9:43 AM
The new site competing site just getting rolling actually screens and only permits companies or qualified people to submit problem sets. Since they're new, there aren't a lot on there, but it's worth considering at: http://intelligence-tools.com.
Posted by: Paul Stadler | August 30, 2008 9:46 AM
I've used MT for getting social bookmarks and I don't see anything wrong with it. How is this spam? If a worker doesn't want to accept the job they don't have to. It's a paid service agreed upon by all parties.
Unfortunately, MT also shut me down for doing it. I asked why and they simply referred to their TOS, which said nothing about the issue.
I wasn't asking anyone to join anything, only to bookmark my sites. If they didn't like my sites or didn't think the pay was high enough, they could (and would) decline. No harm done.
The vast majority of people who accepted the job already had accounts at those bookmarking sites and had numerous other bookmarks already.
Posted by: Bob | August 30, 2008 10:47 AM
It's a complex world in which good/bad is really unclear. Money is being made by doing many things, including breaking captcha, spamming, etc. Being such a large provider, I think Amazon should protect their reputation by updating their policies against these activities. However, there will sure be "niche", smaller players that cater to these groups.
Posted by: Ad Manager | August 30, 2008 11:30 AM
I think it all should come down to tortious interference. If a web site or service has a service agreement that the user has agreed to that prohibits "selling your vote", the person soliciting the service (paying for the votes) could face civil prosecution for tortious interference of the contract between the service user (vote seller) and the service - perpetrated by the solicitor.
I can't imagine it would be very difficult for a service to establish this; at which point other companies would be forced to oblige in the same manner DMCA take-down notices are handled. Whether that's would be good thing or not is a definitely debatable.
Posted by: Nick | August 30, 2008 1:13 PM
@Arturo Servin:
CAPTCHA's have already been attacked in a similar way, if not by Mechanical Turk itself.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=1835
Posted by: BillT | August 31, 2008 4:10 AM
Yeh, I was intrigued by Mechanical Turk a while back.
As for the 'spam', this isn't an illegal or fraudulent use, just a 'frowned upon' use. So, I think these kinds of things will be here to stay.
Posted by: Shirley | August 31, 2008 9:16 AM
I never heard of Turk, but check it out. That is a pretty scary market place. There is all sorts of crap on that. The second post I looked at, "Test my search results", a porn site. Guess it's cheap advertising for 2 cents a test.
There were tons of stuff like this, and if I was actually looking for work, I would have to spend lot of time just filtering out the junk.
First impression of Turk, bad. They need to get rid of that stuff, not to end spammers, but to make their market place appear more desirable to non spammers.
Posted by: Rob | August 31, 2008 11:27 AM
More discussion along these lines:
The seedy side of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk
Posted by: David Pennock | September 2, 2008 8:39 AM
Wahhh, someone's gaming my rigged system.
At the end of the day, this is just one more way an interest or group can run the tables -not entirely unlike a "digg this" button on this very article.
Posted by: turkey | September 2, 2008 1:41 PM
There are lots of software which can do the same job for bookmarking. Why does people needs such an action?
Posted by: SEO Blog | September 3, 2008 7:02 AM
mTurk's a bit pointless for Brits. Whilst we can use it and earn an Amazon gift balance, we can only spend that on US Amazon (meaning pretty books only, with expensive airmail). It's low paying anyway.
I imagine mTurk would be a good way to launder money, too! Albeit at $0.01 at a time!
and @SEO Blog: I expect bots will pick that up, human entries from established users look more genuine.
Posted by: Joe Anderson
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September 3, 2008 3:00 PM
In response to dan's comment (no.5), we welcome anyone who is brave enough to post on GreedyPeople.com and if its about an intermix of fun and services rendered you seek, our site is exactly where you should be. Thanks for the plug dan.
I'd add more here, but I need to go check out Mechanical Turk and see how we can exploit our greedy social network.
Sincerely, Administrator of http://www.GreedyPeople.com.
Posted by: Chick Ciccarelli | September 3, 2008 8:26 PM