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https://www.barandbench.com/columns/bulli-deals-perpetrators-crimes-emboldened-lack-of-prompt-action
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What can be done about the fact that persons unknown have launched an app in order to harass, objectify, and degrade Muslim women sexually? According to the Delhi Police, not much can be done at all.
Although they registered an FIR in the recent Bulli Deals case, this FIR was against unknown persons, not against known Twitter handles. Advocate Vrinda Grover has stated that there has been no progress in such cases since the earlier Sulli Deals: “In each one of them, either the complaint has been closed or we have hit a wall. The police doesn’t inform them about the status or progress of the investigation. There is absolutely no information."
The founder of digital advocacy organisation Internet Freedom Foundation, Apar Gupta, explained that these incidents stem from a program, which is uploaded from the open source platform Github, common in both “Sulli" and “Bulli” deals sites. He laid out the duty of GitHub to comply with local law: "... there is compliance with something called MLAT or the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty process, which has the US as a signatory in 2005 with India. There is a defined process of how these requests are made which emerge from an investigative agency to the Ministry of Home Affairs, which then sends a request to the corresponding department in the foreign country."
There was also a duty, he felt, for Twitter and Instagram to provide the identifying information of the perpetrators to local law enforcement agencies (since the posts were shared from GitHub on these social media platforms). However, they have been as inactive as the police on the issue.
Perhaps Senior Advocate Rebecca John summed it up best when she said: " I am also disturbed by the dual standards of approach followed by agencies in prosecuting and pursuing criminal cases. FIRs are registered by the police against people for simply tweeting or retweeting a news item or news story. And yet when a platform so brazenly targets women from a minority community, you have to prod agencies to first register an FIR and then hope that they conduct robust investigations.”