I&B PSU floats tender to fact-check posts on social media: Report

Broadcast Engineering Consultants India Limited (BECIL), a central public sector enterprise (CPSE) which operates under the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, has floated a tender inviting agencies to provide “solution and services” related to “fact verification and disinformation detection” on social media platforms, according to a report by The Indian Express.

The tender aims at enrolling agencies that can fight fake news and misinformation on social media. BECIL has also directed that all bidders must be able to “identify key influencers behind disinformation” and their geo-location analysis of the disinformation and identify “pages and uploads of videos, images with potential to incite violence”. The tender also proposes the use of artificial intelligence (AI) for such “data classification and clustering”.

As per cyber-law and other fake news dispelling experts, this opens up avenues for illegal scrutiny by the government and is akin to a ‘witch hunt’.

“If we do not know what fake news is, how is the tender awardee going to distinguish between what’s fake and what’s real? What exactly needs to be identified and checked? It does open an easy avenue for illegal or unethical surveillance,” Salman Waris, Founder & Partner, TechLegis Advocates & Solicitors, told the publication.

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) in April, said that it was working on the final lines of the Information Technology Intermediary Guidelines and Guidelines for the use of Social Media Regulations 2020. However, a final draft of the rules has not yet been made public.

“We are still working on fake news guidelines. PIB (Press Information Bureau) does a fact check based on any news or report that comes in traditional media or otherwise any report that goes viral. Social media is different,” a MeitY spokesperson told the publication.

In August 2018, IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad had asked social media platforms to put technology to better use to curb fake news and misinformation. The comments by Prasad had come after several mob lynching incidents were reported across the country in 2018.

WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, has been under fire from the government for failing to control the spread of such messages which were false or provocative in nature. According to probe agencies, these incidents occurred following posts on social media platforms such as WhatsApp. The posts raised alarm about presence of potential child kidnappers and child traffickers in their areas. Even this year, in February, WhatsApp came under scrutiny when a police probe found that members of two communities having created several WhatsApp groups have been circulating inflammatory texts, audio and video messages to rally crowds. Some of these texts were old and unrelated to the incidents.

Facebook and Twitter too have often been criticised by government agencies for doing little to contain fake news or misinformation. Though Twitter has of late started labelling tweets as fake news or containing disinformation, yet experts say that doing so on a large scale may not be feasible.

According to Pratik Sinha, co-founder of fact-checking platform AltNews, identifying the influencers behind such posts or viral news may also not be as easy. “The key issue is how do you identify an influencer? People do not always intend to put out misinformation. They may be in a state of fear and misconstrue things. But that does not mean they wanted to put out some misinformation. We are not a proponent of having criminality associated with misinformation,” Sinha told the publication.