The Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, through BECIL, last month floated (and closed) bids for an agency to provide “solutions and services” related to “fact verification and disinformation detection on social media platforms”. It's not clear what the rush was, but BECIL made the EOI document public on May 13, bids opened on the afternoon of the same day, and closed after a week on May 20. An "Expression of Interest" document precedes an actual tender, bidders may "express their interest" in the project, and may approach the government with a more detailed proposal. The bidding firm has a wide mandate: “Rapid fact verification” of text-based content, image, videos; identify geolocation and verify visual content, and identify fake news, and analyses web data against historical content. Identify "suspicious profiles", pages and uploads of videos, images with potential to incite violence, "key influencers" behind disinformation, and their location via geolocation Identify/detect and monitor: identify and analyse automated and bot behaviours, identify and monitor key trends and hashtags used in spreading disinformation, monitor the activities of disinformation uploaders across multiple social media platforms, detect and analyse coordinated disinformation campaigns Analyse "malicious uniform resource locators and quick response codes", metadata of files, images and videos with fake content; timeline and geolocation of disinformaton; carry out link analysis between different entities spreading fake news; sentiment analysis for large scale disinformation; carry out AI-based data classification and clustering; source code analysis of suspicious files in content; domain reputation analysis The agency will have to develop a…
