MTurk Worker Tips: Common Account Issues
At Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), we heart our workers. We don’t say it often enough. MTurk workers are the lifeblood of the marketplace; they quite simply make it work. However much workers work on MTurk, we want them to feel empowered, informed, and educated marketplace participants. With that in mind, we plan to publish a series of blog posts throughout 2019 aimed at providing additional help and resources for our workers.
We’re kicking off this series by addressing some feedback we’ve received from workers asking for increased transparency around worker investigations and account closures. This blog post outlines some of the more common account issues, why we think these issues are important, and how we resolve the issues as they arise. We hope this helps our worker community better understand what is happening, and how best to participate in a healthy and productive marketplace.
Here are some of the more common worker issues and how we address them:
Issue: Providing information during the registration process that doesn’t match your geographical location.
Why it’s important: Providing accurate information during the registration process is important for several reasons. Your country of registration helps us determine which tax forms (e.g., information reporting forms) we need to provide you. For example, the information US workers input during their tax interview through Amazon Payments allows us to determine whether their payments are subject to reporting, and direct the proper forms to those workers to help them comply with their tax reporting obligations.
Further, many Requesters rely on demographic Qualifications such as the Location Qualification to create HITs designed for workers from specific states, regions, or countries. If workers input a location other than their true location during the registration process, it could lead to an invalid HIT and a rejection by the Requester.
What we do about it: If we detect that you provided inaccurate information during the registration process, we’ll contact you with instructions on how to update your information so that it accurately reflects your true location. If you don’t update your information in a timely manner, we may close your account. In some cases, if a worker is unable to update their registration information accurately, or if their true location is not eligible for registration on MTurk, we may close their account.
Issue: Attempting to create more than one MTurk worker account or allowing others to use your MTurk worker account
Why it’s important: It’s important that an MTurk worker owns and operates only one account, and only that authorized worker uses that account. For example, if a requester creates a survey HIT that specifies 1 unique worker will work on each HIT, the data becomes invalid if the same person submits more than one of those HITs.
What we do about it: If we determine that you own and operate more than one worker account on MTurk, we will select the account we believe to be the most active, close the remaining accounts, and communicate those account closures to you. If we close the wrong account, we’ll work with you to keep the right account open. This issue typically occurs if a worker created an account in the past, stopped using the site, and then returned later and created a new worker account.
If we determine that more than one person is using the same MTurk worker account, we’ll send a warning to the account that explains the prohibited behavior. If the MTurk worker account sharing persists, we may close the account.
In some cases, if we conclude that a worker is attempting to manipulate the site by creating numerous worker accounts in violation of our terms and policies, or otherwise earn money unfairly or in a way that disrupts the marketplace, we may close all accounts related to that worker without warning.
Issue: Submitting HITs in a manner that violates MTurk’s Participation Agreement and Other Policies
Why it’s important: Workers and requesters are bound by the terms of the MTurk Participation Agreement and Acceptable Use Policy, among other policies and terms. We take violations of our terms seriously. Additionally, submitting HITs in a manner that violates the Participation Agreement and other terms can have negative consequences on the worker and may negatively impact the integrity of the marketplace overall, resulting in fewer requesters posting quality HITs.
Negative Consequences for Workers: When a requester creates a HIT, we expect the worker that completes that HIT to exercise their independent human judgment. In other words, the worker should provide thoughtful and reasonable responses to the requester’s instructions and questions. Any deviations from this standard may result in a negative impact on the worker (usually through a HIT Rejection, sometimes through a requester Block) that could limit the number and type of HITs that worker is able to accept in the future. For example, many requesters rely on MTurk’s Approval Rate System Qualifications, which allows requesters to specify that only workers who have had the majority of their HITs approved in the past to work on the requester’s HITs. If a worker fails to exercise independent human judgment, their approval rate could drop and they may be ineligible for certain HITs in the future. Further, workers that frequently fail to exercise human intelligence run the risk of having their account closed.
Negative Consequences for the Marketplace: Submitting HITs that do not meet the standards set forth in our terms is problematic for requesters because they’re not receiving the work product they’re paying workers to perform. This often forces them to reject the HIT and republish that work. This not only affects a worker’s ability to get paid for the HIT, but is problematic for the marketplace overall. Requesters with quality HITs may be less inclined to post HITs on MTurk if they do not receive quality responses from MTurk workers. This in turn will affect how many opportunities are available on the MTurk marketplace overall.
What we do about it: We take this very seriously. Therefore, if we find evidence that a worker has either failed to exercise human intelligence while completing HITs, attempted to use robots, scripts, or other automated means as a substitute for human intelligence, or otherwise violated our Participation Agreement in a way that damages requesters and the marketplace overall, we take appropriate actions. Typically this means the worker will receive a warning outlining the nature of their violation, but in some cases if we detect repeated violations we may choose to close a worker’s account.
We hope this has been an insightful read. Please be sure to review our Participation Agreement (https://www.mturk.com/participation-agreement) and Acceptable Use Policy (https://www.mturk.com/acceptable-use-policy) again, or reach out to us directly on our Contact Us page (https://www.mturk.com/contact-us) if you have any questions.
Thanks!
The MTurk Team
