The Conspiracy of Suspending Political Opponents Twitter handles using fake DMCA reporting.
This story is about India. This story is about Politics. This story is about the hack. This story is about the tricks adopted by the Social media team of ruling party of India to curb all voices of opposition.
In India, if you are on Twitter, you may not be unaware with the online bullying, harassment and abusing done by the right wing trolls especially if you have a different political opinion as the ruling political party i.e. BJP. Many of such abusive trolls are proudly followed by current Prime Minister of India Mr. Narendra Modi. (read this article).
To counter these abusive Paid trolls of ruling party, few Twitter users who want to keep Twitter clean and free of abuses, formed a group ‘Bhakthunters’ (Bhakt is a term used in India for blind supporters of Narendra Modi) and started reporting such abusive profiles. Soon they tasted huge success and their efforts were acknowledged and praised in different section of media.
More than 400 Twitter handles, mostly fake and created by BJP social media trolls, were reported and suspended by Twitter for abusing. In this process, they tasted the blood of @MahaveerM_, one of the most abusive profile followed by Prime Minister of India, Mr.Modi himself. Mahaveer is from camp of Mr.Giriraj Singh, Indian Minister, who support & promote such abusive trolls to harass people on Twitter. According to sources, Mr.Giriraj wrote official letter to Twitter India to bring back Mahaveer’s profile.
This was a big blow to abusive right wing trolls and they want to take REVENGE from @Bhakthunters for this insult.
December last year, at a social media meeting at Delhi office, a conspiracy was planned out to tackle @Bhakthunters and similar profile. Like all Mr.Modi’s development promises, it too was based on Photoshop evidences, fake data and plain big lies. A group of right wing hackers were contacted to execute this conspiracy! And the sad thing is Twitter too fall into their trap.
This was the prologue of the conspiracy, now comes the operational part.
On 13 Jan 2016, a fake domain bhakthunters.co.nf was registered on website biz.nf. Anyone can create any domain here like bjp.co.nf or say pmo.co.nf. Anyone who has little knowledge of technology knows that such domains are usually used for phishing purposes. The bhakthunters.co.ng domain was booking using a email id 14m4n0ns1@gmail.com from IP address 116.72.214.61. I have this information in email from Biz.nf support.
At the same time, they hacked Pakistan’s Intellectual Property website using SQL Injection to generate a fake trademark html page for Bhakthunters using backdated data.
If you see closely, the Inventors names used in this certificate are mostly Indian. This data was taken from Indian Railways Apparatus Patent.
So after creating all this fake trademark information, they reported original Bhakthunters on Twitter for copyright violation. Twitter which is one the most successful social media organization got trapped in this kiddish plan and suspended Bhakthunters! Seems like the IT folks at Twitter missed that how a company with a registered trademark can have a website with co.nf and .tk domains?
The original Bhakthunters team repeatedly requested Twitter’s Support to cancel this suspension which was based on fake data but there was no success.
By doing this, the Social media team of BJP got a tried and tested way of suspending Twitter accounts by reporting fake/fraud DMCAs. They started reporting DMCAs for not only profile pics but also for any photo in tweets and Twitter unknowingly kept on deleting Twitter handles of political opponents in India. Few of the handles suspended under such fraud DMCAs are:
- @Maddy_saheb
- @naam_pk
- @RSSvsINDIA
- @_MiteshPatel
- @ThebhaktSlayer
These handles, with 10,000 of followers, either belonged to Aam Aadmi Party (political opponent of ruling party of India) or were critics of Indian PM Mr.Modi.
Information of all these suspension are available at https://lumendatabase.org/ (a screenshot attached below):
BJP Social media teams started running polls to choose next target which they can report and suspend under fake DMCAs.
The hacker hired by BJP to do all this is @V1RALC0DE and his email is 14m4n0ns1@gmail.com. Same email is used to report fraud DMCAs.
Even after repeating complaints to Twitter Support, there is no action against this forgery, which is being done by paid social media teams of Mr.Modi. Twitter is either under pressure from Indian Government or their support system is not intelligent enough to differentiate between genuine and fraud reports.
This is the story of India and related to politics but this might happen to you or in-fact happening to you to curb your freedom of expression against the governments and authorities.
