“A member of the Stanford Behavioral Laboratory posted on a Prolific forum, “We have noticed a huge leap in the number of participants on the platform in the US Pool, from 40k to 80k. Which is great, however, now a lot of our studies have a gender skew where maybe 85% of participants are women. Plus the age has been averaging around 21.” Wayne State psychologist Hannah Schechter seems to have been the first person to crack the case. “This may be far-fetched,” she tweeted, linking to Frank’s video, “but given the timing, virality of the video, and the user’s follower demographics….” Long-standing Prolific survey-takers complained on Reddit that Frank had made it difficult to find paid surveys to take on the overrun platform.”
Source : A teenager on TikTok disrupted thousands of scientific studies with a single video – The Verge