Hello!

We hope you are doing well and the year, which is now already halfway over, has been good to you so far.

This newsletter carries updates from us for the second quarter of the year. For catching up on the first three months, you can read the newsletter which contains updates from that time period here. In the spirit of full transparency, we wrote both newsletters at the same time towards the end of the second quarter so make sure to read both to catch yourself up with all things Tattle!

Some Quick Highlights

• Co-organised the first MisinfoCon conference in India in Bangalore with Meedan and Hackshackers at Thoughtworks' Bangalore office. It was a convening of technology, policy, media, and design professionals to foster understanding and action around misinformation in India and consisted of two days of lightning talks and workshops, followed by a hackathon on the third day, touching on different aspects of trust and safety online, with a specific focus on platform research, AI and media, storytelling and misinformation response, and gendered disinformation. You can check out the schedule here as well as the recordings from days 1 and 2 here and here respectively.

• Day 3, which was a day for open discussion and brainstorming on the direction for the working groups formulated at the conference was not recorded but updates from them can be tracked here; email us at yash@tattle.co.in if you would like to be a part of the working groups.

• Tattle spoke at the DRAPAC23 Assembly, a convening of over 150 sessions in Chiang Mai, Thailand, held for the purpose of strengthening the solidarity of the digital rights movement in the APAC and also to diversify it with representatives from journalists, designers, technologists, human rights defenders, youth advocates, and those from marginalised communities. We hosted two sessions: One was a playtest workshop on Viral Spiral and the second was a roundtable on the impacts and challenges of language models for South Asian Media in the present age of Mis/Disinformation.

• Feluda was one of the nine open-source solutions featured by UNDP and DPGA at the Nobel Prize Summit in Washington DC in an effort to highlight how open-source innovation is helping to address mis- and disinformation around the world and provide better access to reliable information.

• Towards establishing a community for Uli, not just of potential users but of developers and open-source contributors, we took part in GitHub's efforts to popularise contributions to tech projects that work for the social good. This was done through training of volunteers - titled community managers - in how to use GitHub for structuring and planning out the workflows of projects who will then stay on with each project to perform tasks and pass on the learnings to the projects' teams. The volunteer for Uli in this programme is Kaustubha.

As you can read, things have been quite hectic! But wait, there is some more, and if you are still with us you can read on to find out what they are...

Organisational Things

Switching nodes to now sharing some project happenings:

• The new hirings for Uli have been made. There is a sense of steady and positive momentum. The project is also expanding its community through GitHub's Community Manager programme. This year we are working with a few partner organizations and individual creators for user testing and to expand on our slur list.

• Viral Spiral has been demo'ed to an international audience! We've been on a playtesting spree at IRL locations. We did playtests at Misinfocon India and Tinkerspace, Kochi as well. All these playtests have continually added to the list of feedback that we're incorporating into the game. We are hosting playtest sessions every week. You can sign up here.

• In a somewhat related update, Tattle has been chosen as one of the cohort members of the Factshala Innovation Lab. For the programme, we will be developing another game, focused on imparting media literacy and critical thinking skills in an interactive, easy-to-grasp format and structure. Stay tuned for more updates regarding this.

• One of the learnings from GitHub's community manager programme has been our need to document our work, processes and flows better. Not only on GitHub but in general. Why, may you ask? Well, you can read about the reasons why we are doing this here. We are striving towards doing so, and are already in the process of improving how our GitHub issues and READMEs are written so that ANYBODY (and not just those with a specific skill set or knowledge) can understand what we are doing.

Amidst all this, we also managed to host an open call wherein Preeksha and Haseeba spoke on the costs of misinformation and fake news. They spoke about their research on the impact of misinformation on the poultry sector and expounded on the economic and psychological distress caused due to falsehoods that were spread during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Tattle's Threads

Keeping in tune with our past practice of writing, we also wrote our customary long tweet threads. Maybe not as many as we have in the past, but certainly as many as we could do. You can find them below:

• Thread about centring the safety and concerns of the people whose images are manipulated in the aftermath of this explosion of Generative AI applications.

• Thread on platform co-operatives and how they can bring about social and economic reform through decentralisation of power and ownership.

• Thread on our speaking at a conference that focused on reframing the conversation around AI and the need to move beyond looking at AI as this all-knowing, pervasive being that is an existential risk towards a vision that is more empowering, collaborative, and steeped in local customs and cultures, like Uli.

We would also like to take this space to congratulate Tarunima and Denny for the publication of their chapter in the edited volume, "Mobile Communication and Online Falsehoods in Asia." Their chapter speaks about the unique technical and social affordances of Mobile Instant Messaging Services (like WhatsApp) which, if accounted for, can result in a more productive agenda for protecting Indian citizens on these platforms.

Our People + Products are Going Places

Last quarter it was Viral Spiral that was featured in a report by a news publication, and now it's Uli's turn. The project was featured twice, once by Mozilla Foundation and another by DW Akademie.

We are also showing our work at IRL and virtual events.

Denny spoke at the Future of AI in India convening at TinkerHub in Kerala on tech interventions against social harms and Tarunima was a co-host of a RightsCon session co-hosted alongside GitHub. The session was about the research findings from the report we did with them on developing indices from internet platform data for social sector research.

That is it for this edition of the newsletter! We hope you all have a fun and engaging next three months. Tattle will soon be back in your inboxes but until then, take care!

Regards,
Yash.