The I&B Ministry has extended the deadline for its tender on constructing a social media communications hub, according to a report by Indiantelevision.com. The tender has been criticized for essentially building capacity to conduct mass surveillance of Indian internet users. The Internet Freedom Foundation* has sent a legal notice to the I&B Ministry, demanding that the tender be withdrawn. This is the third time the deadline on the tender has been extended, according to the Indiantelevision.com report. The I&B Ministry has not offered any public comment on criticism of its tender, and reporters did not seem to have brought the topic up at a press event with I&B Minister Rajyavardhan Rathore in Coimbatore on Friday. The tender Here are a few features of what the MIB wants from bidders, as described in the 66-page tender: — The hub needs to create a “analyze as well as visualize large volumes of data across diverse digital platforms in real time”. — It needs to “listen” and respond to online trends on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, blogs, complaint websites, and email. — On top of Indian languages, it needs to support Chinese, German, French and Arabiccontent. — It should provide a visualization of location-based trends. — Influencer insights should be readily available, and archives of conversations should be kept and be searchable — Provide tools for identifying and managing crises in real time — Crawl social media and the internet at large for ‘data mining’ — Create analytic reports and generate predictive analyses The document then goes on to describe, in lengthy detail, the specifications for achieving…
