Amazon Mechanical Turk workers suspended without explanation

Account suspensions roll in

After receiving the initial suspension messages, workers said while they were unable to work on the platform or receive payments from it, they were still able to purchase products from Amazon’s website.

They added that workers were either passed around between Amazon’s different customer service departments for Payments and Mechanical Turk, or otherwise told to create a new account to continue working.

However, one worker described creating a second account as a “huge violation” of Amazon’s own terms of service, noting it has previously been used as a reason for other account suspensions.

“Workers who have taken this awful advice now have an account without any of the qualifications they previously earned. It is like starting over from day one. Imagine being in grad school only to have someone tell you to start over from your freshman year,” said long-time Mechanical Turk worker and lead organiser at Turkopticon, Krystal Kauffman.

“They also wouldn’t let people work because of a Payment account issue, but they would let people buy [from] Amazon using those very same payment methods, which just seems wrong.”

She said that even for those workers who experienced relatively brief suspensions compared to others, “you’ve still missed two weeks of pay and then you’re behind”, adding: “You’ve accumulated late fees on your bills [etc], and then you have to work extra to make up for the system being down. So, it’s very frustrating for the workers who depend on [the platform].”

Giving the example of a 68-year-old man who was “frantic” when he got in touch with Turkopticon, Kauffman said he was unable to buy food or pay rent during his account suspension due to it being his main source of income.

She said his and other workers’ frustration was only intensified by the lack of clarity provided by Amazon around the issue that led to the suspension, and the inability of workers “to get hold of a person who could just fix it”.

Although many turn to Mechanical Turk and other platforms due the flexibility it gives them and the ability to supplement other streams of income, many use if as their primary way of making money.

On the volume of affected workers, Krista Pawloski – another long-time Mechanical Turk worker and Turkopticon organiser – said that although Turkopticon was able to identify hundreds of account suspensions linked to the Amazon Payment issue, the group is unable to reach every worker on the platform, meaning there could be countless more experiencing the same problem.

“Those are just the ones we heard of – there’s obviously workers out there who were affected who don’t know about us,” she said, adding that it’s usually “final” when Amazon decides to suspend an account. “So, a lot of people may have gotten suspended and said, ‘Oh, this is the end of the road for me’, and they’re not even paying attention to the situation anymore – they could potentially have their accounts back and not even know it.”

Pawloski further added that in the case of two workers who did end up creating new accounts on the advice of Amazon, these were subsequently banned from working on the platform.

Track record

Speaking about a previous round of mass suspensions from January 2024, Kauffman relayed how usually these issues are linked to specific tasks that workers are being asked to perform.

In that instance, she said that while there was a two-week long back-and-forth with Amazon trying to identify the issue, the workers themselves were able to figure out what went wrong and what task the suspensions were tied to within half an hour of getting together in the same room.

“Why is it that this small group of people can come together and find the problem, and why should we have to tell Amazon what their problem is? Why aren’t they fixing this themselves?” she said.

“I find it hard to believe that they’re lacking in skills and education to find the problem…We identified the task, we identified the problem, and it was fixed. We weren’t so lucky this time, but slowly, accounts started to be reinstated.”

This time around, the workers who gathered to figure out why they had been suspended were unable to find any commonalities, such as a shared task they completed or having accounts with particular banks.

“We had a couple of different meetings with all the suspended workers, trying to find common ground between everybody, and couldn’t. It really did just seem to be a glitch,” said Pawloski.

She added that from her experience with previous rounds of mass suspension – including the one from January – Amazon never provides details to the workers on exactly what went wrong, how it was resolved, and how to avoid getting caught up in other automated suspensions. So far, the same has been true of the Payments issue.

Ultimately, the workers want Amazon to provide clarity and timely updates when issues arise on the Mechanical Turk platform, rather than being left in the lurch with potentially no money coming in.

“No matter what [the Payments issue] was, you can put a PR spin on it, just let people know,” said Pawloski. “Some people rely on this for their livelihood. It’s their main source of income, and you just took it away. Give them something.”

Following her previous experience of being caught up in the January mass suspension, Pawloski – who has a task rejection rate of 0.01 from nearly a million tasks – said she has looked to diversify her income streams even more, because having to rely on Mechanical Turk for “a big chunk” of her income was becoming unrealistic.

“I hardly any work on MTurk anymore, so they’re driving away good workers. I’ve been on the platform since 2008, I have almost a million hits completed, with [around] 140 of them rejected,” she said: “I’m a good worker, and they drove me away.”