Opinion: Bots started sabotaging my online research. I fought back
I launched an online study earlier this year aimed at understanding the processes that influence eating behaviors and eating disorders among individuals who identify as LGBTQ+. Little did I know I was actually launching a battle with bots.
Online surveys and questionnaires let researchers like me collect large, geographically diverse samples relatively quickly. With the growing availability of machine learning and other big-data methods, there are few easier and more cost-efficient ways to collect data. But these tools have become targets for bots and professional survey takers, which are flooding online research and threatening data integrity.
That threat wasn’t on my mind when my study went live. It consisted of validated self-report questions to measure eating disorder behaviors, exposure to discrimination, psychological well-being, social support, and a number of demographic variables. I was interested in whether sexual orientation and gender influenced eating in ways that we have not yet conceptualized, so I developed a set of
