Chinese activists detained after sharing censored coronavirus material on crowdsourcing site Github
- Source close to Beijing-based trio says they are being held an at unknown location on suspicion of ‘picking quarrels and provoking trouble’
- The three were contributors to a project that aimed to preserve material censors had tried to wipe from the web
Three Chinese volunteers who helped to publish censored Covid-19 articles on Github, the world’s largest open-source website, have been detained by police at an unknown location, according to a source close to them.
The trio – Cai Wei, his girlfriend, a woman surnamed Tang, and Chen Mei – were contributors to a crowd-sourced project known as Terminus2049 that began in 2018 and collected articles that had been removed from mainstream media outlets and social media.
Microsoft-owned Github lets programmers collaborate on code, but has increasingly become a haven for Chinese activists who want to circumvent the Great Firewall to publish censored content.
There are other archives on GitHub that collect coronavirus-related articles and personal accounts found on mainstream and social media, and some of these projects say they hope to keep a record to help people better “understand the epidemic and the people affected by it”.
Terminus2049 appeared to be blocked in mainland China on Saturday.