I’m the CTO at an MTurk competitor (Prolific.ac). We’ve written up some thoughts on this below. It’s unlikely that these accounts are ‘true’ bots but rather low

I’m the CTO at an MTurk competitor (Prolific.ac). We’ve written up some thoughts on this below. It’s unlikely that these accounts are ‘true’ bots but rather low effort workers hiding location with a VPN and providing pseudo random responses. https://blog.prolific.ac/bots-and-data-quality-on-crowdsourcing-platforms/ https://blog.prolific.ac/bots-and-data-quality-on-crowdsourc... https://blog.prolific.ac/how-to-improve-your-data-quality/ https://blog.prolific.ac/how-to-improve-your-data-quality/ We’ve done a lot of work on improving data quality on Prolific and filtering out these kind of accounts and heavily invest in making sure our pool are honest, attentive and engaged. If anyone’s concerned about data quality in online samples please get feel free to get in touch.