Wading Through the Waves of The Pandemic

We lost a 32 year old family friend to Covid-19 last week. He had no co-morbidities but needed to be rushed to the ICU. It took an extra day to find one. After two days in the ICU he passed away, leaving behind amongst others, a five month old.

Last week was also the one in which a close relative announced that the second wave in India was a planned biological attack against the country. I want to reason with them, but given the circumstances, it is difficult to be patient.

In the past, I have been able to laugh at obscurantist conspiracy theories. But this time, these theories only torment. I shrivel thinking that our drive to act will be misdirected at ghost enemies and that we will not invest in the long term changes needed to prevent avoidable deaths.

I've delayed writing this email for a few days- writing it seemed incongruous against the events unfolding in India. It took some time for the shock of the onset of the second wave in India to fade.

It has now sunk in that the crisis India finds itself in is not short-lived. This email then is also an effort to not give into desperation and to persist.

I treated it as an exercise to reflect on the work of the last four months and think about how best to make our work count against the ongoing crisis.

I'll begin by summarizing our work from the last few months:

Research Updates

• Our dataset on Prioritizing User Generated Multi-Media Content for Fact-Checking has been accepted at ICWSM 2021. Most past research on detecting claims for fact checking has focused on textual content and English language. Our dataset focuses on detecting claims in multi-media content found on Indian social media.

• One of our findings from creating this dataset was that 28% of memes contain factual claims. Memes have been a largely ignored category of content in fact-checking. We will be discussing why memes and consequently narratives can be and need to be absorbed in IFCN style fact-checking work.

• We co-authored a paper on Ethical Approaches to Closed Messaging Research: Considerations in Democratic Contexts, released by the Carter Center and Misinfocon. This paper discusses issues of user consent, privacy and data governance in research on closed messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Signal.

• We presented our work on A Case Study of Platform-Seeded Trends and Non/Algorithmic Paternalism from India at the Annual Conference of the Platform Governance Research Network.

Other Talks

• We presented our work on multi-media social media content at a seminar organized by the Institute of Multi-modal communication at the University of Oxford.

• We presented at the workshop on E2EE platforms and political misinformation organized by the Cyber Policy Center at the Stanford Internet Observatory.

• We conducted a Creator Friendly workshop on Scraping Text on the Internet with Dra.ft.

• We spoke about WhatsApp and Misinformation in India at The Bachchao Project's: The Glassroom - Misinformation Edition with Tactical Tech.

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In the next few months, we will be building on our existing research on platforms in India.

We are currently collecting content from 20 public Covid relief groups on WhatsApp with the goal of understanding the lifecycle of information during the crisis.

One aspect that is of particular concern in ongoing relief work is the secondary misuse of personally identifiable information shared on these groups.

The templatized messages circulating on relief groups are amenable for all kinds of data processing. How do we protect ourselves from the downside of such uses?

After over a year of looking at specific social media data in India, we are also looking to zoom out and work towards broader frameworks to describe the information disorder in the country.

There are multiple directions from which such a framework can be approached. One approach could be to center the framework around content types. Another could be centered around the social media consumer. A third could look at the modalities of operations of different adversaries.

There is room to build and adapt this body of work, and think through their relevance for the Indian context.

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With that, I'll close this email.

If you are personally affected by the Covid-19 crisis, I hope you've found ways of grieving and coping.

I have attended playback theater sessions organized by the Yuva Ekta Foundation for two consecutive weeks now, and it has helped me to hear and share stories of survival, loss, regret and faith.

Social isolation seems to deepen the darkness of our tragedies and it helps to remember that, isolated or not, we are not alone in our grief.

Please take care.

Best,
Tarunima