Now Aadhaar authority wants to watch your social media conversations

The Authority issued a bid document on July 18, seeking to hire a social media agency that will employ “online reputation management” and “social listening” tools to monitor and influence conversations related to Aadhaar on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. This is separate from the bid document issued on July 19 to hire a media monitoring agency, which will track all national and regional newspapers, news channels and websites for Aadhaar-related coverage, as reported in Business Standard on Friday.

The scope of the social media agency, as described in the July 18 document, is wider than the media monitoring agency when it comes to monitoring social media. It will segregate Aadhaar-related conversations into “problematic and non-problematic” categories and highlight the “incidences” that may have a “negative impact on the Aadhaar brand”. The agency will provide weekly “Online Reputation Management Reports” to UIDAI, which will have details of “top detractors, top influencers and the net sentiment related to Aadhaar.”




“This monitoring activity shall extend to social media platforms, websites (news and others), blogs/ forums, etc. so that issues related to Aadhaar can be understood,” the tender document states. “The tools shall be capable of doing a sentiment analysis of all such conversations and flag any discrepancy in sentiments’ trend. Additionally, the Service Provider will draft a plan to work out and neutralise negative sentiments.”



Challenge in Supreme Court
The revelation of UIDAI’s interest in monitoring social media conversations with the intent of influencing user sentiments comes at a time when the Information and Broadcasting Ministry’s plan to create a social media monitoring hub faces a challenge in the Supreme Court on the grounds of privacy violation.

Through the Social Media Monitoring hub, the government wanted to monitor the social media accounts of individuals to gauge their opinions about government policies, create “360 degree profiles” of them and target them with personalised messages to alter their opinions. A public interest litigation in the Supreme Court has challenged this on the ground that the government cannot do so without obtaining the consent of the user whose data it would use.

Unlike the Information and Broadcasting Ministry’s tender, the UIDAI’s bid document for hiring a social media agency does not specifically mention the monitoring of individual accounts, but it is not clear how an agency would identify “detractors” or “influencers” without tracking individual accounts.

UIDAI did not respond to Scroll.in’s specific query on whether the authority would be monitoring individual accounts and how this would be done without compromising their privacy.

Concerns over the misuse of social media data have acquired momentum globally over the past few months, ever since it was discovered that the UK-based political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had mined through the social media data of individuals, without their informed consent, to use it for political campaigning. The company is alleged to have analysed the social media posts of individuals to create their psychological profiles, which it used for targeted messaging to influence their voting patterns.

Is monitoring already taking place?
This is not the first time the UIDAI has sought to hire a social media agency. It invited bids in 2016 for an agency that would “monitor individual social media user/account” and categorise sentiments related to Aadhaar into “positive, neutral or negative.” The outcome of the 2016 exercise is not known. The 2016 document explicitly mentioned the monitoring of individual accounts.