Tattle is an open-source civic tech organization dedicated to building software infrastructure and datasets to address digital harms in India. Our mission focuses on designing tools that respond directly to the socio-cultural challenges of the Indian digital landscape.
Uli is our online safety solution for women and gender minorities to help them take action against the online abuse they receive, through proactive social media monitoring.
While Uli existed as a browser extension designed for lexical and semantic slur detection, UNICEF Femtech Ventures is supporting its evolution into a comprehensive, sustainable service.
This expansion shifts our focus from passive feed moderation to proactively connecting frequently targeted users – particularly women and marginalized genders –with counsellor networks, legal aid organizations and localized support communities.
Technology-facilitated gender-based violence restricts individual visibility and shrinks women’s collective participation in civic and democratic discourse, reinforcing broader patterns of exclusion from digital public spheres.
Why we do what we do
Our research over three years shows that women creators – whether as entrepreneurs, advocates or political representatives – struggle to address the consistent harassment they receive online. We were motivated to leverage our existing background in crowdsourcing digital safety data to transition from a localized abuse detection tool into an automated, real-time intervention engine that bridges the gap between victims and institutional support.
In a country with vast linguistic and cultural diversity, and socio-economic identities, online abuse takes various forms. Uli aims to dismantle the structural isolation that silences marginalized voices online. By creating a dependable, community-vetted safety net, we aim to ensure that public-facing individuals can participate fully and safely in democratic, digital life without being forced out by targeted harassment campaigns.
Frequent exposure to a barrage of digital abuse induces chronic psychological distress, burn-out and communicative withdrawal. Online platforms are slow to catch on to newer forms of abuse and devote inadequate resources to low resource languages. Furthermore, as online abuse spreads rapidly across social platforms, platform specific content moderation pipelines are rendered inadequate.
By using machine learning for user-end detection of abuse, we can enable users to take action on the negative engagement they see online.
What makes us different?
Uli differs from existing commercial services by prioritizing human-centric recourse and connective support rather than mere account isolation. Additionally, our backend is powered by the largest crowdsourced dataset of slurs across multiple Indian languages, enabling the tool to detect highly contextualized, regional permutations of abuse that standard models cannot recognize.
Tattle has been open source since day one and Uli is a recognised digital public good (DPG). Operating with a copyleft GPL 3.0 license enables outside security researchers to audit our data practices, ensures complete architectural transparency and invites continuous community-driven iterations from language experts to help expand our detection matrices democratically.
The UNICEF Femtech Ventures investment is fuelling our technical infrastructure expansion and helping us refine our business model. By systematically proving core usability and stickiness with initial cohorts of public figures and content creators during the investment period, we are establishing a validated baseline of user adoption and data efficacy.
This operational track record will provide the essential data and market metrics required to pitch follow-on impact investors and strategic philanthropic partners for multi-regional scaling over the next two years.
Beyond financial support, being part of the Femtech Ventures cohort has provided vital structural frameworks around institutional data governance and security. Participating in technical mentoring sessions and the interactive Pretoria kick-off has allowed us to align our deployment pipelines with global child data protection rules, carry out formal privacy impact assessments, and engage in knowledge exchanges regarding product de-risking and cross-border safety protocols.
Our near-term target is to rapidly construct and finalize our unified application prototype, executing live user testing with our panels of creators and public figures to validate the usability of our real-time notification mechanics. We aim to fine-tune our multi-lingual model architectures against socio-cultural benchmarks, grow our localized support network databases across India, and position the Uli platform for formal validation as an ongoing digital public good.
