Greetings from Tattle!

A few weeks ago, when we wrote the first draft of this email, we had a lot of Tattle specific stories to tell. Now, all those stories pale in comparison to the ones unfolding around us because of the coronavirus pandemic. The pandemic has triggered what some have called an infodemic. But in India, this infodemic has followed on the heels of other similar information crises associated with enactment of Citizenship Amendment Act, elections in Delhi and riots in the capital.

The misinformation cycle in India over the last few months has been a lot like the weather in high altitude mountains- rapidly changing and, for the most part, unforgiving. Through December and January, our feeds were filled with (mis)information about protests and government action around the Citizenship Amendment Act. By end February, we were seeing grotesque visuals associated with the violent riots in Delhi. And over the last few weeks, India, as the rest of the world, has been swamped by unscientific health tips and frightening rumours around the coronavirus.

In this context, it is hard to discuss what in comparison are small struggles and small victories for us as a project. But we will try.

Quick Updates Releases

• Tattle Khoj: a search service to see if an image has been referenced by a Fact Checking site.
• Telegram bot: that lets individuals tag and push content to the Tattle archive.

From The Blog

• Introducing Tattle Khoj.
• Map of Stakeholders in India’s Misinformation Ecosystem.
• Lessons from Una Hakika- a project combatting misinformation in Kenya.

Tattle In The Public

• We spoke to Vice and NPR about the use of Deepfakes in the Delhi election.
• In January, we moderated a stellar panel on ‘The Latest in The Fight Against Misinformation’ at a Roundtable organized by Microsoft Research and Boomlive.
• In November, we spoke about Tattle's implementation of multimodal and multilingual search at Anthill Inside, a premier data science conference in Bangalore.

What We’ve Done So Far

Tattle Khoj

The word Khoj means 'Search' in Hindi and Urdu. The name is self explanatory. The search service surfaces articles from fact checking sites that have referenced the image being being searched. Khoj uses approximate matching techniques. Thus, it can surface articles that might have used images of a different resolution or with additional text. At present, the service surfaces content from six IFCN certified websites. We are quickly adding more.

Following, are some of the additional features we'll be releasing in the next few weeks:

• Searching for fact-check articles by text in Hindi, English and Gujarati.
• Searching for memes by the text inside them.
• Searching by Videos.

Should we expand this service to surface articles from non IFCN certified fact checking websites? Do email your suggestions and feedback to admin@tattle.co.in.

TattleJod Telegram Bot

The word 'Jod' means to join or add in Hindi. This service lets you add images, videos, text messages to Tattle's archive. You can also reply to a message and add tags to it.

Tattle's complete archive is currently behind a login. The goal is to open as much content as possible through Tattle Khoj. But we are still understanding all the risks of collecting and opening some of this data. If you are actively working with content on chat apps and want access to the archive, please send in a request to admin@tattle.co.in.

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Stakeholders in India's Misinformation Ecosystem

Over the last two years, as we thought about and prototyped ideas for citizen driven action on misinformation, we have found a Map of Stakeholders in India's Misinformation Ecosystem to be a useful reference guide. The map not only helps us anchor discussions internally, but also helps in focussing meetings externally. We decided to spend some resources on polishing it up so that it can be shared externally. You can read more about it here.

The Road Ahead

• We are building an annotation platform to allow individuals to annotate content pushed on the archive. This will allow users to search for content based on tags.
• As we increase our channels of data collection, the volume of data will increase considerably. We are working on automated techniques for prioritizing content that can be pushed to the archive. We are also getting legal advice on our data collection practices.
• We’re exploring the idea of federated archives as a way for journalistic groups to maintain editorial control over their own content while also tapping into other groups’ work, if needed. This idea is in the early stages. If you have any views on federated archives, we’d love to talk.

Shout Out to Supporters

• To Nilomee Jesrani for leading branding and UI for Tattle Khoj.
• To Swair Shah for supporting all the amazing search features.
• To Saakshita Prabhakar for working on the stakeholder map.
• To Venkatesh Thapan for the Telegram bot.
• To Kumar Sumeet for advising on infrastructure security practices; Padmini Ray Murray and Naveen Bagalkot at Design Beku for talking to us about ‘designing for India’; to Venkatesh Srinivasan for pushing us to think deeply about the purpose of archives, and archiving for the future (year 2100!).

Stay in Touch

You can follow us on Twitter or join our slack channel. You can Join this mailing list for more structured project updates. Or free feel to email us on this address.

To End Things

A trope used by guides in the Himalayas is-

‘पहाड़ों के मौसम और मुंबई के फैशन पर कभी भरोसा नहीं करना चाहिए। कभी भी बदल सकता है।’

A rough translation would be- 'Never trust the weather on the mountains or the fashion styles in Mumbai. They both change rapidly and unpredictably.'

In the mountains, sunshine can quickly be followed by hail. Similarly, being blinded by fog on a trail shouldn’t be a reason for feeling helpless. The fog too can vanish in a moment.

As the misinformation cycle changes at a mind-boggling pace, work at Tattle continues. Perhaps more vigorously than ever.

We wish you and your loved ones stay safe and healthy.