The unredacted contract, published on 27 July, describes the work as "topic analysis of social media to understand public perception and emerging issues of concern to HGM arising from the COVID-19 crisis".  According to the non-profit Big Brother Watch, "this is effectively AI-powered mass political surveillance.” 

A spokesperson from the AI firm said that the project analysed public posts from Twitter containing words relating to the pandemic, such as “covid” or “coronavirus”, as part of an endeavour to help the government detect emerging issues relating to the pandemic in local communities. According to them, personally identifiable information was stripped out from the data at the point of collection, meaning it would be impossible to use the information to profile any individual or group of people. 

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