The South African Police Service (SAPS) is trying to bolster its capability to trace “fake” social media users who perpetrate crime and instigate violence.
The police have issued a tender to help the force track down people of interest on social
media.
The invitation to tender calls for bidders who will be tasked with accessing different social media accounts and to also give notifications of early warnings on trends.
The closing date for the tender was on Friday.
According to the tender advertisement, bidders are also required to provide linkages cross platforms by accessing private and public information.
The tender also states that bidders will need to integrate search optimisation engines from private to open-source database by providing a full report on all enquiries made while determining the live location by identifying the location servers and real people behind usernames where common friends and frequent contacts should be identified.
Sunday World understands that the proposed project, which is said to be worth millions of rand, was motivated by the civil unrests that gripped Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal last year.
The July riots claimed the lives of 354 people, while several people were arrested last month in connection with the unrest.
Many shops were looted and torched and infrastructure was destroyed. At the time, the unrests also sparked racial wars among Indian and black people in Phoenix, KwaZulu-Natal.
Social media was abuzz during the unrest, with many videos and images shared on different platforms.
Research by Institute for Security Studies (ISS) has shown how messages or tweets, images and videos that generate outrage are amplified through powerful algorithms and artificial intelligence, enabling messages to reach more people faster.
The ISS further recommended that crime intelligence must be equipped to identify unrest patterns on social media before they happen by tracking trending issues and potential influencers during times of tension.
National police spokesperson Colonel Athlenda Mathe said: “All the questions relating to this bid involves operational matters pertaining to the capacity of the SAPS to combat, investigate and prevent crime.
“Such matters will not be discussed in the public domain in order to protect the integrity of investigations, which at all times comply with the law.”
Media Monitoring Africa director William Bird said: “I suspect that the SAPS do not have means and expertise to do the job on their own,and if we look at the case of the failure to act on the cases of the July unrest last year you will see that they didn’t have the means to trace people.
“This is a legacy of the government’s failure in terms of investment in those perimeters.
“On that July unrest cases, police had to follow strict protocols to track down those responsible for fuelling unrests and Twitter helped a lot. All the information that the police got came through the right channels.”
“Even though service providers can be given the tender, it won’t be easy for them to get everything right without going through right channels,” Bird said.
“The SAPS needs a dedicated unit to deal with such investigations (into social media investigations) and also needs the support of fully equipped software companies to get the job done,” he said.
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