Turkers are freelance independent contractors who perform small tasks on Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform, or MTurk, a crowd sourcing marketplace launched in 2005 where Requesters (businesses or individuals) can post tasks that computers can't currently perform or that are cheaper for humans to do. Armies of Turkers can then earn small amounts of money (usually less than one cent per task) to perform the jobs, which might include doing things such as categorizing, sorting, testing, rating, generating content, or training artificial intelligence algorithms that will eventually make the human Turker redundant.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 217