Denying Developers: China’s Censorship of Gitee

• In Event: Authoritarianism in China

Abstract

Censorship has been studied mostly in the context of traditional and social media. However, political censorship can affect any platform on which people can create content and develop networks of users, including platforms that are designed for developers to collaborate on code. When developer platforms get censored, how does it impact the productivity and innovation of programmers? How do programmers react and adapt to such censorship? We study this question in the context of China’s censorship of Gitee (China’s analog to Github) during May of 2022. Using data on thousands of Gitee accounts, we find that censorship of Gitee had a significant and negative impact on use of the platform. In particular, we find that the outside options of the developer were important in determining continued use of Gitee -- users who had existing Github accounts were more likely to decrease their use of Gitee. Our data also allows us to explore how adaptation varies across the type of developer and how networks of collaboration are affected by the censorship event. Our findings have implications for the impacts of censorship on innovation and the relationship between a free information environment and technological development.

Authors

• Patrick Chester, University of California, San Diego

• Margaret E Roberts, University of California, San Diego