Here we are on the other side of the sixteen days of activism. In the newsletter in November we mentioned that we were starting our second round of crowdsourcing for the slur list during the 16 days of activism. During the two weeks we added over fifty news words in Malayalam and 300+ annotations for the different slurs. A big shout out to Akash SS at the Citizen Digital Foundation who led most of the work in Malayalam. You can see the updated slur list and annotations here:
In case you're wondering why we're spending all this time to crowdsource these words, this Wired article does a good job of explaining the utility of such lists.
Between the Hacktoberfest contributions for translating the content on the website and the slur list generated during 16 days of activism, we can officially say that Uli supports Malayalam!
Tattle also had its in-person work sprint in the last week of November. We devoted the sprint to coming up with a roadmap on action against digitally manipulated videos and images. Over the last few months we've seen an increase in the use of AI to generate sexualized morphed videos of women. These are often reported in media as deepfakes. The goal of the sprint was to come up with a year long agenda on: "How can Tattle increase civic agency against Digitally Manipulated Media?" Digitally Manipulated Media (DMM) is an umbrella term for the entire spectrum of shallow fakes to deepfakes. Through the sprint we tested existing open source digital forensic tools, discussed where regulation would be appropriate, the importance of a taxonomy for DMMs, and other ideas. This wiki summarizes the discussions in the week. One concrete outcome of the sprint was the creation of a database of reported DMMs in India: DMM Dataset Public.