Online abuse networks turn to developer’s mode on GitHub

GitHub has told India Today TV that it has longstanding policies against content and conduct involving harassment, discrimination, and inciting violence.

The hygiene of India's online ecosphere has been dealing with a new kind of challenge recently. Targeted attacks on social-media are not a new trend, neither are coordinated online campaigns, based on religious, political and ethnic grounds. However, recent campaigns like ‘Bulli Bai’ demonstrate a growing trend where hate campaigns are seem to be graduating from popular platforms like—Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to more niche platforms like GitHub. In simple terms, GitHub is a code-sharing portal used by thousands of software developers every day, who share the codes of their programs with the community for the purpose of collaboration, improvement, feedback and even as a hobby. The codes are commands for a device that once completed, enable a common person to execute the program in form of a mobile, desktop or web-based application. GitHub is used by many as a repository of source codes where multiple people can work on one or more applications or programs. While it solves many problems faced by developers, the unique features of platforms like GitHub also provide more efficient tools to the actors promoting hateful campaigns against a target or a group. While popular social media platforms are still needed by these actors to populate and promote their campaign among the masses, very often it is GitHub which finds itself as the origin of an app driven campaign like Bulli Bai.

Experts believe that there could be multiple factors influencing the movement of actors to GitHub. Tarun Wig, a Delhi based information security consultant and co-founder of Innefu Labs point outs two major reasons “one is that Facebook and Twitter have now started making stringent policies against abuse of content, they can block the users and support the police departments. Today most of the police departments are taking help of Facebook and Twitter to get the IP addresses of the miscreants”. Platforms like GitHub also allows users to do much more than just post content or codes, programs written in languages such as Python could be used to leverage the publicly available resources such as social media profiles to capture, aggregate and redirect users via a single web link. The second major gain of platforms like GitHub is associated with the increasing trend of Android Packages (APK)—android mobile apps that can be downloaded from GitHub without having to go through the Google’s Play Store platform. “Android dominates almost 70% of the Indian phone market, so anyone with an android phone can download the application and can share with a friend as well and the application becomes viral”, said Wig.

Recent arrests made by the Mumbai police in the ongoing Bulli Bai investigation have also likely been made from the trail left by the users on the social media platform while promoting the app and not from the information received from GitHub. “It is also much more difficult to trace the creator of a mobile app than creator of a social media page”, Wig pointed out earlier.