Chinese Users Turned GitHub into a Land of Free Covid Speech

The platform’s unique resilience can be explained through “the Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism,” says Margaret Roberts, a professor studying Chinese censorship at UC San Diego. The theory, posited by internet thinker Ethan Zuckerman, states that if a website pairs sensitive politics with broadly appealing, popular entertainment—say, lolcat memes—the website will be more challenging […]