Home Ministry to Monitor Social Media Posts in “Assamese” against C(A)A

Guwahati, December 30, 2019:

The Ministry of Home Affairs has set up a special monitoring cell to check social media for posts in the Assamese language against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act.

The Ministry has set up the special cell in collaboration with the “Ernst and Young” group to monitor the social media posts from Assam that are anti-CAA in nature.

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It may be mentioned here that the cell was set up during a meeting held at the new Connaught Place office of the Home Ministry with the IT experts and software engineers to discuss monitoring measures.

A team of five members will be monitoring the posts and will be supported by 33 social media experts from Assam. The 33 experts have been appointed to monitor the posts of Assam’s social media posts in the local language in all the 33 districts.

These 33 experts will elaborate the words to the Home Ministry and if the ministry finds these posts against the government, it will direct the social media service providers to remove the posts and even deactivate the accounts, if required. Accordingly, the local intelligence personnel will be asked to keep a “hawk eye” on those particular users.

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Reportedly, 1 lakh keywords have been listed by the monitoring cell to monitor the social media posts and by a month, a list of 2 lakh keywords will be prepared by these experts.

Anyone posting a social media post among the enlisted keywords will be found out through special application and action will be taken against the person.

It may be mentioned here that earlier, monitoring posts in Unicode was not possible but the special application will be able to scan the words in Unicode.

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