The end of an eventful year

Hello,

2022 has been a terrific year for Tattle. We will do a more in-depth retrospective in our annual report in 2023. But the end of the calendar year has its own significance. So, in this last quarter update, we will also do a quick overview of Tattle's work in 2022.

Last December, we had been a third of the way through our project on online gender-based violence, now called Uli. And we were just taking on two new projects - a study with Monk Prayogshala on incentives that motivate people to share more accurate content online; and a project with GitHub on releasing data from public code collaboration on the platform for international development, public policy and economics. Two months later, in Feb 2022, we also won a grant to build Viral Spiral - a digital card game to build resilience to misinformation.

Here's the TLDR version of the work done in the year:

Uli was launched and we've received fantastic feedback. During demos and presentations, we heard use cases (eg. classroom teaching) that we hadn't anticipated when we built it. We've been consolidating the feedback to prioritize features for the next phase. We are excited to get back to building Uli next year!
We did a soft launch of Viral Spiral in November and have had two virtual play-test sessions. This followed the in-person play testing sessions in Pune and Mumbai. The full launch is scheduled for Feb 2023.
The experiment on studying incentives for sharing accurate information was concluded. A study with over 930 individuals was no small feat. Much to everyone's surprise, neither financial incentives nor social validation affected an individual's intention to share accurate information. The preprint can be found here: https://psyarxiv.com/nykxz/. Our collaborators at Monk Prayogshala are now presenting the results at different conferences.
We concluded the first phase of our report with GitHub and are close to finishing the second.

None of these projects would have been possible without the funders and partners who trusted us. So, thank you Grant for the Web, The Mercatus Center and Point Of View for trusting us and taking a bet on our ideas.

Tattle Learns to Talk About Itself

We have received consistent feedback to improve our external communications. In the last quarter, we tried different communication strategies that leverage our strengths. Some are going to make it to the next year.

If you follow us on Twitter, you might have noticed our weekly Monday musings. Every week, a different team member reflects and talks about their work in these threads. These blog-length tweet threads speak to many different audiences. Here are some that we feel especially good about:

How online games could help build resilience to misinformation
What a publicly serviceable internet could look like
The unclear terms and norms around scraping in India
A thread describing how the machine learning in Uli works

We've also held monthly open calls where people at Tattle or those aligned with Tattle's work have spoken about their work. The highlight was Lubhyathi Renganathan speaking about the sedition database, and Veethika M. talking about their experience with designing FOSS software at GitLab.

Out and About in Town

It has been a busy year with talks, demos, and media features. Notable mentions from this quarter are:

We spoke on the Mozilla's IRL podcast, on the challenges of moderation in Indian languages.
We presented Uli at APC's regional convening on Hate Speech, and UNFPA's symposium on technology facilitated GBV.
We were shortlisted for the Agami Prize.

You can see the longer list of talks and media interactions here: https://tattle.co.in/updates/

The Organization is its People

We have maintained that we see our role, and the role of tech in general, as amplifiers of other organizations' work. This year, our roster of collaborators included researchers, psychologists, writers, artists, activists, which is exactly the kind of diverse group we hoped we would work with when we started Tattle.

A special shout out to Monk Prayogshala, CIS and the Viral Spiral team. It is our strong belief that multi-disciplinarity is key to tackling misinformation and hate speech in India. We hope the tribe goes stronger every year.

What is Next

We're excited to start the next year focusing on growing Uli and launching Viral Spiral. And we are looking forward to more collaborations to advance the conversation on healthier online environments in India.

As always, our emphasis will remain on civic understanding and action, evidence, data and tech. We think the recent focus on federated social media platforms is an exciting window of opportunity.

With that, we wrap up an eventful year and take a needed end-of-year break. We wish you and your loved ones a restful end of the year, and a joyous beginning to the new one.

Regards,
Tarunima