Nuances and Challenges of Moderating a Code Collaboration Platform
Margaret Tucker, Rose Coogan, Will Pace · Journal of Online Trust and Safety · 2024
Introduction "Online platform" is an exceptionally broad term that has been used to describe social media networks, marketplaces, search engines, communication services, and many more internet services (West 2019).It comes as no surprise that the majority of studies focusing on the content moderation practices of online platforms has focused on the few "very large online platforms," to borrow a term from the European Union's Digital Services Act, 1 with the highest user counts and general-purpose uses.It is certainly important to understand how the largest platforms function, especially when they have massive influence over modern speech and society, but platforms with specialized purposes and niche user groups have significant lessons for the field of Trust and Safety and platform studies writ large.This commentary offers GitHub as an example of an atypical platform whose purpose and user group has driven its content moderation practices.It will explore what makes a code collaboration platform different from other platforms, how addressing code as content influences GitHub's content moderation approach, and how this approach is driven by the norms and needs of the software developer community.1.1 What is GitHub Founded in 2008, GitHub is a developer platform that enables users to host, share, and collaborate on software code.Since its inception, GitHub has grown to become the largest code collaboration platform, with over 100 million users working together on code throughout the world.GitHub is a significant steward of the world's open source 2 software, which is especially important because open source software is an integral component of the world's digital infrastructure: in a survey of 1,067 commercial codebases across 17 industries, 96% contained open source components (Synopsys 2024).GitHub's role as a home for the open source software community has driven substantial investments in securing open source at scale.In 2021, GitHub launched GitHub Copilot, an AI-driven pair programmer that provides real-time code suggestions and chat assistance in natural 1.See DSA: Very large online platforms and search engines 2. See Open Source Initiative open source definition.