GitHub hosted a near-clone of a hate app it had already taken down once

In mid-2021, an app called 'Sulli Deals' appeared on GitHub, using code to display photos of Muslim women in India as if they were up for a mock 'auction,' without their consent. It stayed online for weeks before GitHub took it down. On January 1, 2022, a near-identical app called 'Bulli Bai' — using the same slur pattern, the same auction format, and targeting many of the same kind of outspoken women, including journalists and activists — appeared again, also hosted on GitHub's code repositories.

GitHub took the second app down quickly once it drew mass social media attention, but critics pointed out that a company with 73 million developers and long-standing anti-harassment policies had no mechanism to catch a clone of code it had already removed once. GitHub does not proactively moderate uploaded code; it acts only once it receives a complaint, which meant the second app was live and screenshotted widely before anyone at the company saw it.

Digital rights advocates in India said GitHub never published any account of how it handled the Sulli Deals takedown or what it changed afterward, so there was nothing in place to stop a rebuilt version from going up again under a new name eight months later.

A second round of global press and user backlash in GitHub's fastest-growing developer market, with no public explanation of how the same code got rebuilt and reposted.

GitHub's moderation was complaint-driven rather than proactive, so a clone of already-removed code could be re-uploaded and stay live until it went viral.

The company gave no public account of the first takedown, so there was no documented signal — internal or external — that the same pattern of code needed watching.

Code that targets people is hard to distinguish automatically from lawful code with a one-line difference, which GitHub's own policy team acknowledged made a blanket technical fix difficult.

The targets were largely vocal critics of India's ruling party's handling of religious minorities, which meant the app functioned as harassment aimed at silencing specific women, not a one-off prank.

Taking down one violation without a way to flag its near-copies guarantees a repeat — moderation has to target the pattern in the code, not just the single instance.

GitHub took down Bulli Bai after the backlash and said it maintains policies against harassment and discrimination, but it did not answer specific questions from Rest of World about how the repeat happened or what moderation changes followed. Indian police opened investigations into the app's creators. No public GitHub policy change or transparency report on code-based harassment followed the incident.