#TwitterDMCALoopHoles
Twitter has been witnessing a continuous and fierce war between supporters of BJP and AAP since last 4 years. And one aspect of this war is to get accounts of the opponents suspended. Account suspension is achieved when someone reports an account to twitter and if twitter decides that the account has failed to adhere to the terms of service and twitter rules, twitter suspends the account. When an account is suspended, the online warriors claim the hunt by announcing the suspension via a dedicated account.
There used to be a group called The Bhakt Hunters (now defunct, suspended using FAKE DMCA complaint) and recently suspended The Bhakt Slayer from AAP supporter camp. BJP side had AAPTard Hunter (not as much popular as the previous two) and recently terminated infant accounts Terminator Bhakt & Devil Bhakt.
Recently, many AAP supporter accounts have been suspended and there’s a huge buzz around these accounts on twitter, but the story didn’t start this week. There used to be a group called The Bhakt Hunters (TBH, now defunct, suspended using FAKE DMCA complaint). A separate thorough article is here on medium.com about suspension of TBH which touches upon the DMCA aspect as well. TBH was highly successful in their mission of suspending abusive Bhakt accounts (word Bhakt being used for blind supporters of Modi) and reportedly there are 300+ accounts suspended by TBH. After suspension of TBH handle under fake DMCA complaint, the TBH group was unable to get twitter to revoke suspension and since then TBH is defunct. But recently, another group resurfaced — called TBS (The Bhakt Slayer)-which was as successful at getting the bhakt accounts suspended, but faster.
In short span of less than 6 months TBS succeeded in getting 360+ Bhakt accounts suspended, many of them with huge fan following. This rattled Bhakts and they retaliated by suspending accounts of whom they call AAPTards (meaning AAP supporters). TBS was first casualty of course, but subsequently around 10 accounts have been suspended including highly popular @NavenduSingh_, @DonMufflerMan, @__Sahil, @iDragonRyder & @DaaruBaazMehta. Bhakts have already threatened to get other popular aap supporter accounts like @kapsology, @Ankita_Shah8, @aartic02, @HasanSafin etc. This is retaliation full throttle. Keep an eye if these get suspended. If my twitter account @Montu_Here gets suspended for writing this article, it will just be one more proof of what’s happening.
Nevertheless, 4 accounts of AAP supporters, @naam_pk, @maddy_saheb, @_MiteshPatel and @RSSvsINDIA were special in these suspension spree (suspended by the terminator bhakt, which itself is now suspended) which caused huge commotion in supporters of both AAP & BJP. While these were small accounts with 6–12K followers, BJP supporters targeted them because of highly effective nature of their Anti-BJP Campaign. However, these accounts were special because the way these were suspended. They were suspended under Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
DMCA is Law of USA that protects copyright, and twitter being USA based company is bound to honour DMCA complaints. So whenever twitter receives a DMCA complaint (it’s really simple, copy links of tweets with images from an account you want to get suspended, upload those images anywhere and fill out this form, even fake details works as has been proved in above referred article by @kapsology), it asks the owner of the account — against whom the complaint is filed — to remove the material referred in the complaint or file a DMCA Counter Notification. But there’s a flaw. IF many DMCA complaints are filed within a short period of time (say 30 minutes), Twitter suspends the account and forces the twitter handle. So to suspend a twitter account — ANY twitter account, one just needs to file DMCA complaints in a short period of time. Twitter doesn’t judge if the complainant is really copyright owner or not. Twitter’s support system is mostly automated. Bots read your messages, bots try to interpret it and bots give responses based on whatever words it found in your email text. Dumb really. Anyways, important thing here is — claiming fake copyright and filing fake DMCA is a crime (Jurisprudence 101).
The AAP supporter accounts recently suspended have been victim of such fake copyright complaints. Whatever happens to the suspended accounts, the complaints remain not only in twitter’s database and email conversations with complainants and victims, but also in lumen database, which is a repository of all DMCA complaints. Twitter forwards all complaints to lumen database. The very fact that fake identity has been used to suspend these accounts is proof enough to act against the complainant — if the government wants to pursue this cyber-crime. So if the victim of any of these account resides in a non-BJP ruled state and decides to file an FIR under cyber crime, the person responsible for making fake DMCA complaints is looking at a definite conviction. Tracing out the origin of the complaints is really trivial, if cyber-crime department chooses to investigate.
The facts of these suspensions are in Public Domain, so if the Digital Government of India doesn’t act against the fake DMCA complaints, this too shall be a signal for those who want to suppress the voices of opponents and no dissenter’s account is safe henceforth, as it would mean that fake DMCA complaints now have support of Government of India.
In any case, this suspensions of 4 small accounts will have a big impact on future of online political discourse.
