Rebuilding trust in online information.

Everyone deserves reliable information to make decisions.

We build public-interest AI tools in service of human agency online. Our work defends civic discourse that shapes elections, healthcare, and public policy.

Visit Arbiter Read our research

75+: journalists using our platform
2B+: monthly reach of content we audit
8: countries

Q1 2024 · Bangladesh

National-news feature →
Meta safety action

2025 · Burkina Faso

AI slop, flagged
before YouTube labeled it

Foundations

Ford Foundation Omidyar Network Mozilla Foundation Wikimedia Foundation

Public and multilateral

Goethe Institut DW Akademie UNDP

Industry and academia

Google Research Amazon Cohere AI Fast Forward MIT

What we ship

Unifying the platform, the mechanism, and the community to rebuild trust in online information.

Arbiter is the platform that shows the public what is shaping their feeds. Sakhi operationalises the same trust mechanisms to deliver reliable information for antenatal care. NextGenAI builds the community of engineers who will ship the next wave of responsible AI.

arbiter.simppl.org/investigations/synthetic-media-q3-2025

NarrativesNetworksLLM agentsCross-platformQ3 2025 · 6 platforms

Flagged narrative · inauthentic amplification

Coordinated amplification of a civic narrative by inauthentic accounts

Authenticity score

low

Cluster · 14 nodes

Top microinfluencers

@civic_voice_officialYouTube · 2.4M subs
0.84
@truth_uncensoredX · 480K followers
0.71
@news_aggregator_24Telegram · 6 channels
0.68

Citation chain

inauthentic account seeds claim→+ 4 reposts in 9 minutes→+ cross-platform amplification→+ AI-voiced derivative on YouTube

Platform · Arbiter

Arbiter shows the public what is shaping their feeds.

Arbiter is a public observatory for digital narratives. Journalists, regulators, and civil-society researchers use it to trace stories across the popular mainstream social platforms, where content reaches over two billion people each month. Built with platform-approved data and local partners worldwide.

Visit Arbiter All publications

Sakhi field visit, Jalgaon, January 2025.

Mechanism · Sakhi

Sakhi operationalises the same trust mechanisms, for antenatal care.

SimPPL's mission is to surface reliable information for people to trust, and Arbiter has always been the north star for the lab. With Sakhi we operationalise the same mechanisms to deliver reliable information to individuals, and measure whether it can change antenatal care practices. A multilingual WhatsApp chatbot in Marathi, Hindi, and Bangla, built with frontline health workers and clinicians, evaluated inside two field RCTs in India and Bangladesh.

AI for Healthcare Sakhi deck

Community · NextGenAI

NextGenAI trains the community of engineers who will ship the next wave of responsible AI.

A Responsible AI program for undergraduate teams in India, supported by Google and Mozilla across two fellowship tracks. 82+ students have come through the program. Sakhi spun out of NextGenAI.

AI for Education All fellowships

All programs

Since 2017

How we got here. Six moments that shaped what SimPPL is now.

2017
01
DJ Unicode founded at DJ Sanghvi College, Mumbai.
2021
02
SimPPL launched as a research collective.
2023
03
Mozilla Responsible Computing Challenge inaugural India award. WikiCred funds Arbiter.
2024
04
Incorporated as a U.S. 501(c)(3). Featured in Rest of World ahead of Meta Bangladesh CIB takedown.
2025
05
Sakhi Jalgaon endline. Cohere AI multilingual reproductive-health benchmark.
2026
06
Selected for the Fast Forward Tech Nonprofit Accelerator.

Areas of research

Social, economic, and technological drivers of digital trust.

We work where the three drivers meet: behavior, incentives, and machinery. Each area below names what we are investigating and what we have published recently.

Social drivers

How communities form, share, and update beliefs online. User controls and platform governance. Cross-platform narrative coordination.

User controls and engagement on Bluesky (n = 110K blocking events)
Coordinated cross-platform narrative tracing

Economic drivers

How attention markets shape what reaches whom. Source credibility under scale; pink-slime websites and AI-generated news.

Domain credibility from machine-harvestable indicators (regression vs LLM)
Market-design interventions for safer agentic AI

Technological drivers

Multilingual evaluation for low-resource languages. Reproductive-health LLM benchmarks. Human-in-the-loop review of AI medical advice.

Multilingual reproductive-health benchmark (with Cohere AI)
Health-Eval clinician review framework

All publications

May 2026 · latest issue

Narratives from Germany: whale rescue, state election, and F1 integrity — plus our reading shelf.

Three new Arbiter reports on cross-platform dynamics, then short picks on Claude context hygiene, Gephi 0.11, world-model lectures, moderation strategy, higher-order networks, and competition law in the AI era.

Newsletter, ~1,200 words / month

Press · coverage

Where SimPPL has been covered.

8 mentions

2025

Who captures the value journalists create?

Rest of World2024

We can adapt the same system to teach about public health or about elections, and more importantly, we've built out an entire monitoring infrastructure so we can intervene on these conversations, with consent, before people are misled.

3 minutes with Swapneel Mehta