"I Am a Troll" Exposes Indian BJP's Vicious Attack Machine

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi follows hundreds of twitter accounts regularly tweeting abuses and threats of rape and other forms of physical violence against Indian actors, artists, politicians, journalists, minorities in India and individuals of Pakistani origin, according to Swati Chaturvedi, author of "I am a Troll: Inside the Secret World of BJP's Digital Army".

Swati Chaturvedi

Swati Chaturvedi is an Indian journalist who found herself targeted by ruling BJP's highly organized professional troll operation directed from a location, called National Digital Operations Center (NDOC), in New Delhi, India. NDOC is staffed by paid workers as well as volunteers. Many of the volunteers are well-educated non-resident Indians (NRIs) from the United States and other parts of the world.

Threats Against Chaturvedi:

BJP trolls have spread lies about Chaturvedi being a "nymphomaniac" and threatened her with "Nirbhaya-style rape or an AK-47 bullet" to get her to shut up. Each morning she woke up to "hundreds of notifications discussing my "rate"". She says "her mornings were filled with rage and a sick, slightly nauseous feelings. The attacks were personal and I had had enough." She said she filed a criminal complaint under sections of Indian Penal Code dealing with "stalking, sexual harassment, transmitting obscene material over the Internet."  Twitter suspended the account and provided the IP address of the offender. But there was no action by Delhi Police.

Disinformation Campaign:

The BJP has extensively used social media apps to spread rumors, innuendo,  fake news, outright lies and various forms of disinformation against anyone seen to be even mildly critical of their leader Narendra Modi. Their harshest abuse has been targeted at the Opposition Congress party leaders, various liberal individuals and groups, Muslims and Pakistanis.

Chaturvedi cites many instances of hateful tweets from Modi-loving Hindu trolls, including Singer Abhijeet's lies to generate hatred against Muslims and Pakistan and BJP MP Hukum Singh's false claim of "Hindu exodus" from Kairana in western Uttar Pradesh blaming it on Muslims.

Kashmir and Pakistan:

Some of Twitter handles followed by Modi, including the account of BJP leader Giriraj Singh, routinely tell the BJP government critics to "go to Pakistan".

Chaturvedi talks about the use of graphic images of cow slaughter from Bangladesh and Pakistan being passed off with audio suppressed by BJP trolls as occurring in India as part of their campaign to stir up trouble against Indian Muslims.

Chaturvedi writes about "open gloating on Twitter at the pellet blindings in Kashmir during the protests that followed Burhan Wani's death. This was accompanied by calls on social media for the mass murder of Kashmiris. One Twitter handle @ggiittiikkaa with 80,000 followers--including Prime Minister Modi--tweeted pictures of Wani's funeral procession and added 20K attended funeral of terrorist Burhan. Should have dropped a bomb and given permanent Azadi to these 20K pigs". 

Modi Encourages Hate:

Prime Minister Modi has 21.6 million followers on Twitter and he follows 1375 people, according to Swati. Among the handles followed by Modi, there are at least twenty six accounts that "routinely sexually harass, make death threats and abuse politicians from other parties and journalists, with special attention given to women, minorities and Dalits. Describing themselves as "proud Hindu", "Garvit Hindu", "desh bhakt", "Namo Bhakt", "Bharat Mata Ki Jai", and "Vande Matram", these users are loud and proud, inevitably have a display picture with Mr. Modi and proclaim to be "blessed to be followed by the Prime Minister of India".

Sadhvi Khosla:

Among the key sources of Chaturvedi's research is Sadhvi Khosla who has direct experience as an ex volunteer at BJP's NDOC in New Delhi. Khosla volunteered at NDOC for two years. She began her stint before the elections in 2014 and left in late 2015.

Khosla told The Caravan magazine that "there was continuous hate directed at minorities, some journalists, and anyone else who has opposing views. When the head of the NDOC (Arvind Gupta) sends me direct WhatsApp messages saying, sign the petition to remove Aamir Khan from the Snapdeal campaign, what does that mean? When the head sends you messages with hashtags for the day and targets for the day, what does it mean? No one is forcing me to do work, but it means that the heads of these organizations are endorsing such views. To me, it becomes the official line."

Social Media, Fakes News and Disinformation Campaign:

The US intelligence report released after the November 2016 elections indicates that BJP-like tactics were used by the Russians in the 2016 US elections to help the Trump campaign. Ranjit Goswami, Vice Chancellor of RK University in the Indian state of Gujarat, explained this phenomenon in a piece titled "India has been post-truth for years" wrote about it as follows: "As the US (with Trump's election) and UK (Brexit) wake up to this new era, it’s worth noting that the world’s largest democracy has been living in a post-truth world for years'.

Summary:

Social media are rapidly changing the communications landscape of the world. Everyone, including politicians, bigots, demagogues and ordinary citizens, has its own megaphones to spread whatever message they like: love, hate, anger, lies, peace, violence, etc.  These messages become much more potent and powerful when done in an organized fashion such as the BJP's professional troll operation or the Russian intelligence's information ops. It's important to acknowledge the power of the social media and find ways to make it a force for good.

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Views: 907

Comment by Riaz Haq on November 12, 2018 at 9:59pm

#Hindu #Nationalism is driving force behind fake news in #India. There's an overlap of #FakeNews sources on #Twitter and support networks of PM #Modi. Findings part of extensive research in India, #Kenya, and #Nigeria in how citizens spread fake news. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-46146877

Widespread sharing of false rumours on WhatsApp has led to a wave of violence in India, with people forwarding on fake messages about child abductors to friends and family out of a sense of duty to protect loved ones and communities.

According to a separate BBC analysis, at least 32 people have been killed in the past year in incidents involving rumours spread on social media or messaging apps.

Comment by Riaz Haq on November 13, 2018 at 8:22am

#India Leads The World In The Number Of #Internet Shutdowns: Report via @forbes
#censorship #Kashmir #socialmedia #freedom https://www.forbes.com/sites/meghabahree/2018/11/12/india-leads-the...

India leads the world in the number of internet shutdowns, with over 100 reported incidents in 2018 alone, according to a report by Freedom House, a U.S.-based non-profit that conducts research and advocacy on democracy, political freedom, and human rights.
Freedom on the Net, an annual study by Freedom House on internet and digital media freedom in 65 countries around the globe, which covers 87% of the world’s internet users, scores countries from zero (most free) to 100 (least free). This serves as the basis for an internet freedom status designation of "free" for countries that score between 0 and 30, "partly free" for countries between 31 and 60, or "not free" for those with scores of 61 or higher. The newly released report is the eighth in this series and covers developments that occurred between June 2017 and May 2018.
Of the 65 countries assessed, 26 have been on an overall decline since June 2017, while 19 saw net improvements. In almost half of the countries where internet freedom declined, the reductions were related to elections, the report said.


India scored 43, two points lower than last year. The biggest score declines took place in Egypt and Sri Lanka, followed by Cambodia, Kenya, Nigeria, the Philippines and Venezuela. China remained the worst abuser of internet freedom in 2018, and over the past year, its government hosted media officials from dozens of countries for seminars on its sprawling system of censorship and surveillance, the report said. Its score: 88.
Comment by Riaz Haq on April 1, 2019 at 4:20pm

#India’s political parties are spreading #misinformation. #BJP Cyber Army 400+ WhatsApp group includes head of the BJP IT: “This Group is Nationalists Group With #Hindu Warriors Working To Save Nation from congress, communists, #Islam, #Christianity.”#Modi https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/04/india-mis...

EW DELHI—In the days following a suicide bombing against Indian security forces in Kashmir this year, a message began circulating in WhatsApp groups across the country. It claimed that a leader of the Congress Party, the national opposition, had promised a large sum of money to the attacker’s family, and to free other “terrorists” and “stone pelters” from prison, if the state voted for Congress in upcoming parliamentary elections.

The message was posted to dozens of WhatsApp groups that appeared to promote Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party, and seemed aimed at painting the BJP’s main national challenger as being soft on militancy in Kashmir, which remains contested between India and Pakistan, just as the two countries seemed to be on the brink of war.

The claim, however, was fake. No member of Congress, at either a national or a state level, had made any such statement. Yet delivered in the run-up to the election, and having spread with remarkable speed, that message offered a window into a worsening problem here.

India is facing information wars of an unprecedented nature and scale. Indians are bombarded with fake news and divisive propaganda on a near-constant basis from a wide range of sources, from television news to global platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp. But unlike in the United States, where the focus has been on foreign-backed misinformation campaigns shaping elections and public discourse, the fake news circulating here isn’t manufactured abroad.

Read: India’s lynching epidemic and the problem with blaming tech

Many of India’s misinformation campaigns are developed and run by political parties with nationwide cyberarmies; they target not only political opponents, but also religious minorities and dissenting individuals, with propaganda rooted in domestic divisions and prejudices. The consequences of such targeted misinformation are extreme, from death threats to actual murders—in the past year, more than two dozen people have been lynched by mobs spurred by nothing more than rumors sent over WhatsApp.

Elections beginning this month will stoke those tensions, and containing fake news will be one of India’s biggest challenges. It won’t be easy.

Comment by Riaz Haq on April 1, 2019 at 6:18pm

Microsoft survey: #India topping #fakenews menace globally, more pains likely ahead of polls - #BJP #Modi 

https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/india/microsoft-survey-india-topp...


Interestingly, the survey finds that there has been a sharp 9 percentage points increase in family and friends spreading online risks to 29 percent.

Internet users in the country are more likely to encounter fake news online than the global average and social circles are increasingly spreading risks, says a global survey.

The Microsoft survey, covering 22 countries and coming a few months ahead of the general elections, shows that as many as 64 percent of the Indians surveyed have encountered fake news as against the global average of 57 per cent.

The country is ahead of the global average on Internet hoaxes with 54 percent of those surveyed reporting so and also instances of phishing or spoofing at 42 per cent, Microsoft said in a statement Tuesday.

Interestingly, the survey finds that there has been a sharp 9 percentage points increase in family and friends spreading online risks to 29 percent.

"Social circles became riskier in India," the survey said, adding the jump to 29 percent has taken the country a little over the global average.

Indians are also higher than global average when it comes to reporting of severe pain from online risks, with 52 percent saying so as against the global average of 28 percent.

In what only complicates the matter, the country saw increased consequences from risks and little positive action taken following online risk exposure, the survey said.

"Indians match the worldwide trend for consequences and were more likely to say that they were stressed and lost sleep in the latest year versus the previous year's study," the survey said.

India also showed drop in positive actions taken following online risk exposure and are less likely to pause before replying to someone whom they disagreed with online. Millennials and teenagers are the hardest hit by online risks and also sought help online, it said.

Comment by Riaz Haq on April 2, 2019 at 9:59am

Facebook, Twitter sucked into India-Pakistan information war
Drazen Jorgic, Alasdair Pal

https://af.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idAFKCN1RE18V

ISLAMABAD/NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Pakistani social media campaigner Hanzala Tayyab leads about 300 ultra-nationalist cyber warriors fighting an internet war with arch-foe India, in a battle that is increasingly sucking in global tech giants such as Twitter and Facebook.

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In India, similar nationalist groups are popping up and pushing to purge and punish those who they perceive to be critical of India – or supportive of Pakistan – on social media.

One such group, Clean the Nation, says its actions have resulted in more than 50 people who had posted what it called anti-India comments and remarks critical of India’s armed forces being arrested or suspended from work or education.

“This is our motherland and if someone is abusing people who are protecting our motherland, actually fighting on the ground, I don’t believe they should be allowed to work here or allowed to live here,” Rahul Kaushik, one of co-founders the group, told Reuters. “This is a clear case of treason, in our view.”

--------------------

With a combined population of 1.5 billion, India and Pakistan are hot growth markets for Facebook and Twitter, say analysts.

But with many rival ultra-nationalist and extremist groups in the region using Facebook and Twitter platforms to advance their political agenda, both companies face accusations of bias whenever they suspend accounts.

Facebook has been buffeted by controversies across the globe in recent years, including for not stopping the use of fake accounts to try to sway public opinion in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election and Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, and for not acting to stamp out hate speech on its platform that was fuelling ethnic violence in Myanmar.

Four Facebook and more than 20 Twitter accounts belonging to members of the Pakistan Cyber Force have been shuttered in the past two months, according to Tayyab, who is still angry at Twitter for shutting down his previous personal account in 2016.

A Twitter spokeswoman said: “We believe in impartiality and do not take any actions based on political viewpoints.”

Comment by Riaz Haq on April 3, 2019 at 9:17am

In #India Election, Lies, #Hate Speech Flummox #Facebook. Major #Indian parties run sophisticated #disinformation #socialmedia campaigns with false, manipulated photos and videos, coordinating posts across a network of paid acolytes, volunteers. #Modi #BJP https://nyti.ms/2FGEX0m

On Monday, the company said it had removed hundreds of misleading pages and accounts associated with the B.J.P. and its main rival, the Indian National Congress, many of which were publishing false information. Facebook also removed more than 100 fake pages and accounts controlled by the Pakistani military.

India — where the company has 340 million users, more than in any other country — poses distinct challenges. Posts and videos in more than a dozen languages regularly flummox Facebook’s automated screening software and its human moderators, both of which are built largely around English. Many problematic posts come directly from candidates, political parties and the media. And on WhatsApp, where messages are encrypted, the company has little visibility into what is being shared.

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After a suicide bombing on Feb. 14 in the disputed border region of Kashmir, India accused neighboring Pakistan of harboring the terrorists who it said had orchestrated the attack. The two countries quickly traded airstrikes.

Online, there was another battle.

One clip that circulated widely on Facebook and other services purported to show an aerial assault by India on an alleged terrorist camp in Pakistan. It was, in fact, taken from a video game. Photographs of dead bodies wrapped in white, supposedly of Pakistani militants killed in the attack, actually depicted victims of a 2015 heat wave, according to fact checkers. And local news outlets raced to post shreds of “exclusive” information about the hostilities, much of it downright false.

Facebook executives said the deluge was extraordinary. “I’ve never seen anything like this before — the scale of fake content circulating on one story,” tweeted Trushar Barot, a former BBC journalist who leads the social network’s anti-disinformation efforts in India.

----------------------

After Mr. Modi’s victory, Facebook advised him on how to use its service to govern, including getting government agencies and officials online. In 2015, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, hosted Mr. Modi for a televised chat at the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters. Facebook held India up as a model for how governments could use the social network.

Facebook has since played down its connection to politicians around the world, including Mr. Modi, amid a rise in political misinformation. Ajit Mohan, a former Fox executive who became the social network’s first India chief in January, said, “We are absolutely not affiliated to any political party in India or anywhere else in the world.”

Comment by Riaz Haq on February 27, 2020 at 10:25am

Big #Tech's honeymoon with world's 2nd largest #internet #market is ending. Rules on local #data storage will hurt #India's tech growth. #Delhi's Current data protection legislation lacks people protection and gives govt a supra interest over everyone https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/26/tech/india-internet-regulation-tech-...

In the 2010s, India's internet exploded. More than half a billion Indians came online in the 10 years to September 2019, according to the latest government data, and the country now has twice as many internet users as the entire population of the United States.

And Big Tech rushed to cash in. Facebook (FB) CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter (TWTR) CEO Jack Dorsey both visited India and met the country's Prime Minister Narendra Modi, as did Google (GOOGL) CEO Sundar Pichai and Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Satya Nadella, both of whom were born and grew up in India. Nadella and Amazon's Jeff Bezos both made their second visits to the country as tech CEOs earlier this year.
All those tech giants, along with others including Uber (UBER) and Netflix (NFLX), collectively invested billions in their Indian operations, rolling out several "India-first" features and local language versions of their platforms. More billions came from their Asian peers like SoftBank (SFTBF), Tencent (TCEHY), Bytedance and Alibaba (BABA) — mostly through investments in India's biggest startups.
But India is now making changes to the rules of operating in the country that could make the next decade much tougher for those global tech firms trying to profit from its massive market. A raft of regulations in the works will affect how companies — particularly foreign ones — collect and store data, sell products online and protect their users' privacy. With growing, government-backed internet shutdowns, their basic access to their users is being cut off in many parts of the country.

In perhaps a sign of the changing times, neither Bezos nor Nadella, the latter of whom recently criticized India's controversial citizenship bill, publicly met Modi during their visits this year.

With nearly 700 million internet users and almost an equal number of people yet to come online for the first time, India is too big a market to ignore. But the tightening of restrictions on foreign tech companies and government intervention in controlling the internet are sparking concerns that the world's largest democracy is becoming increasingly China-esque.
"A heavy-handed government that wishes to use technology to surveil its own citizens or control the narrative by curtailing their free speech and expression is not interested in using technology for the good but merely to control," says Mishi Choudhary, co-founder and legal director of New York-based tech advocacy group Software Freedom Law Center. "In such scenarios comparisons with the Chinese authoritarian internet are natural."
What India does next will likely have implications for the internet far beyond its own borders.
"India's potential and opportunity are undisputed, however its attempt to artificially ringfence itself from the global digital economy is concerning," says Jeff Paine, managing director of the Asia Internet Coalition, a tech industry group whose members include Google, Facebook, Amazon and Twitter. "We hope policy makers will take a holistic and long-term view."

Comment by Riaz Haq on August 14, 2020 at 5:33pm

Before #India’s elections in 2019, #Facebook took down inauthentic pages tied to #Pakistan’s military & #Indian Opposition Congress party, but it didn't remove #BJP accounts spewing anti-#Muslim #hate & #fakenews. Why? FB executive Ankhi Das intervened. https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-hate-speech-india-politics-mu...

In 2017, Ms. Das wrote an essay, illustrated with Facebook’s thumbs-up logo, praising Mr. Modi. It was posted to his website and featured in his mobile app.

On her own Facebook page, Ms. Das shared a post from a former police official, who said he is Muslim, in which he called India’s Muslims traditionally a “degenerate community” for whom “Nothing except purity of religion and implementation of Shariah matter.”

---------

In Facebook posts and public appearances, Indian politician T. Raja Singh has said Rohingya Muslim immigrants should be shot, called Muslims traitors and threatened to raze mosques.

Facebook Inc. employees charged with policing the platform were watching. By March of this year, they concluded Mr. Singh not only had violated the company’s hate-speech rules but qualified as dangerous, a designation that takes into account a person’s off-platform activities, according to current and former Facebook employees familiar with the matter.

---

Yet Mr. Singh, a member of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist party, is still active on Facebook and Instagram, where he has hundreds of thousands of followers. The company’s top public-policy executive in the country, Ankhi Das, opposed applying the hate-speech rules to Mr. Singh and at least three other Hindu nationalist individuals and groups flagged internally for promoting or participating in violence, said the current and former employees.

Ms. Das, whose job also includes lobbying India’s government on Facebook’s behalf, told staff members that punishing violations by politicians from Mr. Modi’s party would damage the company’s business prospects in the country, Facebook’s biggest global market by number of users, the current and former employees said.

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India is a vital market for Facebook, which isn’t allowed to operate in China, the only other nation with more than one billion people. India has more Facebook and WhatsApp users than any other country, and Facebook has chosen it as the market in which to introduce payments, encryption and initiatives to tie its products together in new ways that Mr. Zuckerberg has said will occupy Facebook for the next decade. In April, Facebook said it would spend $5.7 billion on a new partnership with an Indian telecom operator to expand operations in the country—its biggest foreign investment.

-----------
Another BJP legislator, a member of Parliament named Anantkumar Hegde, has posted essays and cartoons to his Facebook page alleging that Muslims are spreading Covid-19 in the country in a conspiracy to wage “Corona Jihad.” Human-rights groups say such unfounded allegations, which violate Facebook’s hate speech rules barring direct attacks on people based on “protected characteristics” such as religion, are linked to attacks on Muslims in India, and have been designated as hate speech by Twitter Inc.

While Twitter has suspended Mr. Hegde’s account as a result of such posts, prompting him to call for an investigation of the company, Facebook took no action until the Journal sought comment from the company about his “Corona Jihad” posts. Facebook removed some of them on Thursday. Mr. Hegde didn’t respond to a request for comment.

------------

Within hours of the videotaped message, which Mr. Mishra uploaded to Facebook, rioting broke out that left dozens of people dead. Most of the victims were Muslims, and some of their killings were organized via Facebook’s WhatsApp.

Comment by Riaz Haq on August 30, 2020 at 9:08pm

Riaz Haq has left a new comment on your post "Two of 265 India-Linked Anti-Pakistan Fake News Si...":

#Facebook #India exec Ankhi Das supported #Modi, saying a day before #Modi's victory in 2014: “We lit a fire to his social media campaign and the rest is of course history..it’s taken thirty years of grassroots work to rid India of state socialism finally" https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-executive-supported-indias-mo...

Ms. Das made her sentiments on the race clear. When a fellow staffer noted in response to one of her internal posts that the BJP’s primary opponent, the Indian National Congress, had a larger following on Facebook than Mr. Modi’s individual page, Ms. Das responded: “Don’t diminish him by comparing him with INC. Ah well—let my bias not show!!!”

Internally, Ms. Das presented the company’s work with the BJP as benefiting Facebook as well.

“We’ve been lobbying them for months to include many of our top priorities,” she said of the BJP’s official platform, noting that the document was littered with the word “technology” and appeared to embrace Facebook’s desire for an expanded but less heavily regulated internet. “Now they just need to go and win the elections,” she wrote.
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The (Ankhi Das) posts cover the years 2012 to 2014 and were made to a Facebook group designed for employees in India, though it was open to anyone in the company globally who wanted to join. Several hundred Facebook employees were members of the group during those years.

Ms. Das is already at the center of a political outcry in India over Facebook’s handling of hate speech on the platform, following a Journal article earlier this month. That article showed that Ms. Das earlier this year opposed moves to ban from the platform a politician from Mr. Modi’s party whose anti-Muslim comments violated Facebook’s rules.

From its earliest days when it morphed from a college social network into a global political force, Facebook has presented itself as a neutral platform that doesn’t favor any party or viewpoint. The company’s head of global affairs, Nick Clegg, has said the company’s role is to provide the court, not “pick up a racket and start playing.” Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly stressed his position that the company should remain politically neutral, including this year when he defended his decision not to act against provocative posts from President Trump.

Facebook on Tuesday said the posts by Ms. Das don’t show inappropriate bias.

“These posts are taken out of context and don’t represent the full scope of Facebook’s efforts to support the use of our platform by parties across the Indian political spectrum,” spokesman Andy Stone said.

Ms. Das didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. She has apologized to colleagues for sharing a post described in the previous Journal article, in which she approvingly reposted an essay from a former Indian police official who said the country’s Muslims have historically been “a degenerate community.”

As in the U.S., Facebook’s India-based public policy team serves two functions. Staffers make and enforce the platform’s rules about what is and isn’t allowed to be posted, and they represent the company’s interests before governments. Critics both outside the company and inside have increasingly raised concerns about how those roles may conflict.

Comment by Riaz Haq on July 10, 2021 at 12:54pm

Sulli Deals: The #Indian #Muslim women 'up for sale' on an app. The app pretended to offer users the chance to buy a "Sulli" - a derogatory slang term used by right-wing #Hindu trolls for Muslim women. #Hindutva #Islamophobia #Modi #India - BBC News

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-57764271

Last Sunday, dozens of Muslim women in India found they had been put up for sale online.

Hana Khan, a commercial pilot whose name was on the list, told the BBC she was alerted to it when a friend sent her a tweet.

The tweet took her to "Sulli Deals", an app and website that had taken publicly available pictures of women and created profiles, describing the women as "deals of the day".

The app's landing page had a photo of an unknown woman. On the next two pages Ms Khan saw photos of her friends. On the page after that she saw herself.

"I counted 83 names. There could be more," she told the BBC. "They'd taken my photo from Twitter and it had my user name. This app was running for 20 days and we didn't even know about it. It sent chills down my spine."

The app pretended to offer users the chance to buy a "Sulli" - a derogatory slang term used by right-wing Hindu trolls for Muslim women. There was no real auction of any kind - the purpose of the app was just to degrade and humiliate.

Ms Khan said she had been targeted was because of her religion. "I'm a Muslim woman who's seen and heard," she said. "And they want to silence us."

GitHub - the web platform that hosted the open source app - shut it down quickly following complaints. "We suspended user accounts following the investigation of reports of such activity, all of which violate our policies," the company said in a statement.

But the experience has left women scarred. Those who featured on the app were all vocal Muslims, including journalists, activists, artists or researchers. A few have since deleted their social media accounts and many others said they were afraid of further harassment.

"No matter how strong you are, but if your picture and other personal information is made public, it scares you, it disturbs you," another woman told the BBC Hindi service.

But several of the women whose details were shared on the app have taken to social media to call out the "perverts", and vowed to fight. A dozen have formed a WhatsApp group to seek - and offer - support and some of them, including Ms Khan, have lodged complaints with the police.

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