“Our mission is to organize mutual aid, resources, and advocacy to improve conditions for all people using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (AMT) platform while striving to make this work a good job for all.
Turkopticon was founded by Lilly Irani and Six Silberman as a review website to provide AMT workers with a space to share information about bad requesters and tasks. This forum also serves as a safety net. Workers are still coming to the website ten years later to check requesters’ reviews before they accept tasks. BUT, WAIT! THERE IS MORE!
In 2019 it was decided that Turkopticon could be more than a review site. Platform workers came together to form a team with Lilly and Six. Graduate students and tech workers stepped forward to help with software needs and more. We are so excited to be able to say that we are now a worker-led non-profit organization!
We advocate for AMT workers, known as Turkers, and their rights. We bring issues to the Amazon Mechanical Turk team such as unfair worker account suspensions, general questions and/or concerns from the turker/requester community, problem requesters who do things like mass reject tasks, requester billing account issues, and much more. We go where we are needed.”
“Turkopticon adds functionality to Amazon Mechanical Turk as you browse for HITs and review status of work you’ve done. As you browse HITs, Turkopticon places a button next to each requester and highlights requesters for whom there are reviews from other workers. Bad reviews let you avoid shady employers and good reviews help you find fair ones. You can view reports made against requesters with a quick click.”
