Second Quarter Happenings from Tattle 📝

The past quarter had it all - a fantastic in-person meeting, an award(!), feature launches and some talks.
We had a short month to set up the WhatsApp tipline for the Deepfakes Analysis Unit. It went live at the end of the first quarter. Most of the second quarter was spent in hyper-vigilance to keep the tipline running uninterrupted, through the Indian election. The quarter flew past us! It took us a few weeks to catch our breath. Here are the updates from our work from April 2024- June 2024.

Project Updates

Deepfakes Analysis Unit Dashboard:

This February, we started working with the Misinformation Combat Alliance (MCA) to launch a WhatsApp tipline focused on responding to suspected Deepfakes. The Deepfakes Analysis Unit (DAU) was created within the MCA to handle this project. Tattle was responsible for building the dashboard behind the WhatsApp tipline for the DAU. The WhatsApp tipline went live at the end of Q1.

Through the second quarter we were rapidly adding new features to the DAU dashboard. Notable features include:
- automating response generation for users sending content to the WhatsApp tipline, based on the information that the DAU secretariat added for a post. You can read our feature update here.
- detecting when a media item sent is identical or similar to a previous media item and automating response to it. You can read our feature update here
One of the reasons we were able to get the tipline launched in such a short timeline was because we had built many of the building blocks over the last few years. Feluda was featured and listed in a blog by the Digital Public Goods Alliance as a DPG supporting information integrity at the critical time of elections.
The DAU was well received as a collaborative endeavor to respond to the emerging crisis of deepfakes. The DAU received the award for the 'Most Innovative Collaboration' at Global Fact. We're excited and grateful to have played a part in the success of this collaboration.

Uli:

Uli is our longstanding project to enable collective response to online gendered abuse. While we first developed datasets on gendered abuse in Indian languages for the Uli plugin, these datasets are also stand-alone resources for Trust and Safety teams and researchers.

A consistent feedback we'd received about Uli was that we needed to do a better job of explaining how the different streams of work within Uli came together towards the goal of responding to online gendered abuse. Vijayalakshmi came to the rescue and crafted a series of blog posts recounting the two years of work.
We also continued to grow the slur lists with our partner organizations. The slur list now has over 630 words across Indian English, Tamil, Hindi, and Malayalam, with 300+ annotated after the latest round of annotations conducted with our partner organisations in the month of April. This work lays the foundations for building new features to convert the redaction process into a learning tool, in Q3.
Uli received global recognition for its unique approach to annotation as well. The Uli dataset paper that explains this process received the Outstanding Paper Award at the Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms, held at the NAACL 2024. The reviewers noted the novelty in the process of creating this dataset and lauded the participatory approach.

Tattle in the Community

We engaged with Code for GovTech's Dedicated Mentoring Programme and listed three open issues, each pertaining to a distinct project, on their catalogue for contributors to work towards. The programme is an initiative to build an open-source community around Digital Public Goods (DPG), Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), and tech building blocks with use cases in social impact. Three people were shortlisted from the application round for working on these tasks and you can track progress on each of these tasks on their respective issues on GitHub.
As a partner for Internews' Protecting Online Rights of Changemakers project, Tattle disseminated the online tech policy awareness study amongst our contacts and partners, and provided feedback to a focus group discussion conducted by CUTS International, another project partner, in Delhi.
In May, we had the privilege of participating in the Asia Disinformation Co-Lab in Bangkok put together by Numun Fund. The event gathered researchers, activists, media practitioners, designers, and developers from across Asia and aimed to enhance analysis and action against disinformation and hate speech by exploring concrete strategies to tackle disinformation and the sharing of insights, experiences, and recommendations.
In 2023, Tattle, through Uli, was one of the project participants in Github's pilot program on open source community management, where volunteer community managers were selected to assist and help DPGs improve their efforts in building and growing a community. This year, we are assisting Github in running the second cohort of the program- we've been working with them so far to finalise the training curriculum, coordinate with the participants, and prepare assessment material. Our engagement will continue towards the end of this year, and we hope to see it create more impact for open source projects.

From the Blog:

We wrote a 2-part blog series on cross-platform abuse on online platforms and the responses that have come up in response to this phenomenon, and make suggestions for what federated and centralised platforms must implement in order to tackle cross-platform abuse more effectively.
We also wrote on the importance of prioritizing security from the beginning of a project. The blog discusses how using open source tools like GitHub Actions and Renovate can make security accessible and foundational for any level of project. It also highlights how embedding security measures early can catch vulnerabilities and create a framework for collaboration and replicability, ultimately improving the digital ecosystem for all developers.
Tarunima was a part of a panel on working towards a more just and fair Internet through design, code, and content, held during the AoIR Flashpoint Symposium conducted at IIIT-Hyderabad in April. The overall programme was structured around forms and structures of labour contributing to digital infrastructures, content, and systems. You can find the recording of the event here
The research we executed with Monk Prayogshala in 2022 was presented by our colleague at MP at the Behavioural Public Policy Workshop conducted at NUS in Singapore.

IRL in Kochi!

The team's destination for the in-person work sprint this quarter was Kochi in Kerala, where we worked alongside Rati Foundation, a group addressing sexual violence online and on-ground. We worked out of TinkerSpace, Kerala's first hackerspace. It is modelled and built as a community-centred learning initiative, bringing together FOSS enthusiasts, builders and change makers. The experience was memorable and we thank them for letting us utilise their space!

TinkerSpace also hosted a discussion with the two organisations, wherein Rati spoke about their helpline for children and women facing online harms in India, Meri Helpline, and we spoke about building citizen-centric technologies against these threats.

That's it for the updates from the past 3 months. Stay tuned to further developments from us about what we get up to in July, August and September!

Take care.

Regards,
Yash.