Government paid Vote Leave AI firm to analyse UK citizens' tweets

Privacy campaigners have expressed alarm after the government revealed it had hired an artificial intelligence firm to collect and analyse the tweets of UK citizens as part of a coronavirus-related contract. Faculty, which was hired by Dominic Cummings to work for the Vote Leave campaign and counts two current and former Conservative ministers among its shareholders, was paid £400,000 by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government for the work, according to a copy of the contract published online. In June the Guardian reported Faculty had been awarded the contract, but that key passages in the published version of the document describing the work that the company would carry out had been redacted. In response to questions about the contract in the House of Lords, the government published an unredacted version of the contract, which describes the company's work as "topic analysis of social media to understand public perception and emerging issues of concern to HMG arising from the Covid-19 crisis". A further paragraph describes how machine learning will be applied to social media data.