GitHub Shadowbans Anti-Censorship Coder Account for a Link to the Christchurch Mosque Shootings Video

On the 10th of April GitHub shadowbanned an account of Russian anti-censorship programmer ValdikSS. At the top of every GitHub page he was seeing:

Your account has been flagged.
Because of that, your profile is hidden from the public. If you believe this is a mistake, contact support to have your account status reviewed.

When trying to sign in to other sites via GitHub OAuth he was getting an error:

You are marked as spam, and therefore cannot authorize a third party application.

The author made three assumptions about the reason of the ban:

1. Because of revelations about security issues in the article “Exploiting signed bootloaders to circumvent UEFI Secure Boot” and a repo with the source codes on GitHub.
2. Because of a GitHub gist published by him that contained torrent links to the video of the Christchurch mosque shootings distribution of which is a criminal offence in New Zealand and is prohibited on many online platforms.
3. Because anti-spam protection of GitHub registered suspicious activity from the IP range of his internet provider. This assumption was corroborated by the fact that at the same day he started receiving “403 Forbidden” responses on other sites too.
4. Some other people supposed that it may be due to the tool GoodbyeDPI that is used to circumvent censorship in many countries and that was hosted in a GitHub repo.

The GitHub gist with links to the video of the Christchurch mosque shootings

About the position of ValdikSS on shooting video distribution you may read from his tweets and Russian comments on habr.com:

After some time he got a response from GitHub support clarifying the reason:

Sources

• ValdikSS’s Twitter thread about hosting in the cloud against self-hosting.
• ValdikSS’s Twitter reply about self censoring to the shooting video.
• «GitHub полностью «удалил» репозиторий утилиты для обхода блокировок и весь аккаунт создателя», publication on habr.com by Jeditobe, 12 of April 2019.
• “Tell HN: GitHub deleted anti-censorship activist repositories”, flagged thread on HackerNews by zzzcpan, 12 of April 2019.

404 reply for a GitHub account of ValdikSS