Hello,

Happy New Year from Tattle!

I had a nightmare on New Year’s Eve. We were all on a flat earth. Our vaccinated bodies contained micro chips through which Bill Gates made us overthrow democracies.

This nightmare confirmed my untested hypotheses. No matter how bad a year is, misinformation will make it ten times worse.

I wanted to get over this nightmare by looking back at the good that happened to us in 2020. What I realized was that due to the chaotic nature of the year, most good things happened in the deviations from set plans and in the improvisations along the way.

This update is to recollect all those mini journeys we undertook last year.

We found that Deepfakes can be good.

As a team working on misinformation, we are naturally curious about deepfakes.

Through a series of coincidences, we got talking to an Indian journalist about a lead he had gotten on the use of deepfakes in Delhi elections. We connected him to a team of researchers that specialize in technology for deepfake detection.

The interactions led to us being quoted for his article in Vice and being interviewed by NPR.

This eventually led to us being noticed by Kruttika, a data scientist who also happens to be a chess grandmaster and a journalist in a past life. We obviously immediately hired her.

I don’t think paying a million dollars to do a targeted ad campaign for this role would have yielded such a great match.

And for that I have to say something that probably no sane person has ever said:

“Thank you Deepfakes. You have improved my life in unimaginable ways.”

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We lost a researcher to astrology

In April, we began experimenting with an ML classifier to deal with spammy content that was making it to our archive.

To create a training dataset, we had to comb through thousands of posts manually. What many people might not know is that there is a lot of quackery on regional Indian social media.

A common advertisement was of "Vashikaran" services. Vashikaran loosely translates to controlling someone via hypnosis.

To undo hours of laborious, mind-numbing manual annotation of this data, we held a Zoom party at the end of the process.

During this party, we called the numbers listed on the advertisements to understand exactly what these services offered.

The scenario our teammate shared was of being a lesbian seeking to marry her girlfriend in India.

The "guru" on the other end assured us that he could make it happen by controlling the minds of her parents. All he needed was the names of the parents.

Soon after, our teammate stopped working with us. The last we heard, she had found a new area of research - studying quackery on Indian social media.

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We found an a e s t h e t i c

We’d been obsessed with finding what we internally called an "Indian aesthetic" for Tattle's visuals.

You can tell we were serious about it because we created a mood board for it.

In the early days, we took things in our desperate, non-illustrator hands and tried to draw our aspirational aesthetic.

Fortunately, we discovered Eishita's work. Over a six month period, one illustration led to another and we converged on an aesthetic unique to Tattle and hopefully familiar to our audiences.

This collaboration finally culminated in this visual representation of our Data Archive.

If you can picture yourself hanging out with these folks at the Archive, let us know and we'll send you an invite to the grand opening.

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Here's a new reason to visit our website

There's an Updates page where we maintain a consolidated listing of highlights.

Read it here.

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What's brewing?

It wouldn't make sense to talk only of the past in a New Year email. So here are some things to look forward to:

The Short Term (6 months - 1 year):

• Starting a project with Center for Internet and Society, India on moderating gender based violence in Indian regional languages.
• Reducing the friction in accessing the archive, and expanding its usage.
• Expanding our WhatsApp scraper into a more user-friendly app that anyone can use to archive content from their closed messaging apps.

The Slightly Long Term (1 year - 3 years):

• Growing the community of journalists, designers and developers using open source tech to respond to misinformation.
• Pursuing collaborative projects on misinformation response in India, with other organizations.
• Maintaining and growing the Tattle archive.

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If you are interested in our ten year plan, we want to buy you a coffee. You can drink it on the other end of the video call in which we discuss our grand plans.

Help Us Find Our Board!

We're currently looking for board members to advise us on the following aspects of Tattle's work:

• journalism/media engagement
• research strategy
• technical product development
• organization/community building

If you are interested, or know someone who would be, please do let us know!

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Stay in Touch

You can follow us on Twitter, join our Slack channel or mailing list for more structured project updates.

For specific questions, feel free to email us at admin@tattle.co.in.

Specific hate mails for this update should be directed to Denny.