When Rajyavardhan Rathore became the Minister for Information & Broadcasting, he mostly evaded the topic of social media. "Social media is totally independent," he said. "And in any case, social media doesn’t even come under this ministry." But just over two weeks ago, the ministry posted a tender saying that it was going to set up a social media communications hub. So far, so good. But then, the tender, which was first reported by Scroll.in, went on to say that the bidder must be able to monitor Twitter, Instagram, some blogs, and YouTube. It also said that the tool that is created for this purpose must keep track of key influencers and be able to archive and retrieve older conversations. And to top it all off, it will have to create a '360-degree' view of everyone it tracks and create 'personalized responses'. And it will have to do all this for a cool ₹47 crore. IFF notice Right down to natural language processing and 'sentiment analysis', the tender has all the makings of an intent to surveil. Days after news of the tender broke on Scroll, the Internet Freedom Foundation* sent the ministry a legal notice demanding that the tender be withdrawn. "Putting the entire online population of internet users in India who invariably will use the social media [sic] platforms and email for communication," the notice warned, "will have a tremendous chilling effect on their fundamental right to free speech and expression." The notice warned that IFF would resort to…
