Mamata Banerjee with Mohua Moitra

NEW DELHI: A day before the Centre withdrew its proposed social media communication hub (SMCH) proposal, Trinamool Congress MLA Mohua Moitra had moved the Supreme Court challenging the Unique Identification Authority of India’s plan to select a social media agency (SMA), which she alleged had the same intention of monitoring citizens’ activities on social media platforms.

On Friday, attorney general K K Venugopal announced withdrawal of SMCH for a review which made a bench headed by CJI Dipak Misra dispose of Moitra’s petition challenging it. On Thursday, Moitra, through advocate Mohd Nizam Pasha, had filed a petition challenging UIDAI’s decision to float a request for proposal (RFP) to select an SMA on the lines of the RFP floated earlier by the Centre for creation of SMCH.

Pasha had mentioned the petition on Thursday before a bench of CJI Misra and Justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud and sought listing along with Moitra’s other petition on Friday but the bench said it would come up for hearing in due course.

Moitra’s petition said, “A perusal of the ‘scope of work’ in the impugned RFP includes deploying a ‘social listening tool’ to ‘track and monitor online conversations relating to Aadhaar’. Further, the selected social media agency is to identify and ‘neutralise negative sentiments’ related to Aadhaar.” The SC had reserved its verdict on the validity of Aadhaar, created by UIDAI, on May 10.

Moitra’s petition said the RFP’s worrisome part was that the SMA would be asked to “track social media networks for key words related to Aadhaar in particular, and respond to them in a way to initiate positive conversations on social media”. “It is clear that capacity and mandate to track social media networks in general is to be available with the SMA, although the purported emphasis may be on Aadhaar in particular,” she added.

In UIDAI’s RFP, ‘social media’ is defined to include Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google Plus and any other platform where UIDAI wishes to participate in future, she said. “The SMA is to employ a top-rated social listening tool to track and monitor online conversations relating to Aadhaar and this monitoring will extend to social media platforms, websites (news and others), blogs/forums etc,” she said.

Moitra said the listening tool, according to the RFP, must be “capable of doing a sentiment analysis of all such conversations and flag any discrepancy in the sentiments’ trend” and the SMA must work out a plan to “neutralise negative sentiments”. She sought quashing of UIDAI’s RFP for creation of SMA.

