How the internet and its bots are sabotaging scientific research

Technology then leapt ahead, in a very short period of time.

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The democratization of the internet opened it up to yet more and more people, and artificial intelligence grew in pervasiveness and technical capacity. So, where are we now?

As members of an international interest group looking at fraud in research (Fraud Analysis in Internet Research, or Fair), we've realized that it is now harder than ever to identify if someone is real. There are companies that scientists can pay to provide us with participants for internet research, and they in turn pay the participants.

While they do have checks and balances in place to reduce fraud, it’s probably impossible to eradicate it completely. Many people live in countries where the standard of living is low, but the internet is available. If they sign up to “work” for one of these companies, they can make a reasonable amount of money this way, possibly even more than they can in jobs involving hard labor and long hours in unsanitary or dangerous conditions.

In itself, this is not a problem. However, there will always be a temptation to maximize the number of studies they can participate in, and one way to do this is to pretend to be relevant to, and eligible for, a larger number of studies. Gaming the system is likely to be happening, and some of us have seen indirect evidence of this (people with extraordinarily high numbers of concurrent illnesses, for example).