About
GitHub's approach and commitment
We are committed to creating a safe and inclusive environment for the developer community, while minimizing disruption to software projects, protecting developer privacy, and being transparent with developers about content moderation actions and disclosure of user information. This kind of transparency is vital for informing our users about potential impacts on privacy, access to information, and the ability to dispute decisions that affect their content.
We continue to strive for excellence in our transparency reports by pursuing reporting that reflects the spirit of the Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation and by following the guidelines set forth in the United Nations report on content moderation.
Limiting content removal
We limit content removal, in line with lawful limitations, as much as possible by:
- Aligning our Acceptable Use Policies with restrictions on free expression, for example, on hate speech, under international human rights law.
- Providing users an opportunity to remediate or remove specific content rather than blocking entire repositories, when we see that is possible.
- Restricting access to content only in those jurisdictions where it is illegal (geoblocking), rather than removing it for all users worldwide.
- Before removing content based on alleged circumvention of copyright controls (under Section 1201 of the US DMCA or similar laws in other countries), we carefully review both the legal and technical claims, and we sponsor a Developer Defense Fund to provide developers with meaningful access to legal resources to guard against abuse when their code projects are legally challenged.
Promoting transparency
We promote transparency by:
- Developing our policies in public by open sourcing them so that our users can provide input and track changes
- Explaining our reasons for making policy decisions
- Notifying users when we need to restrict content, and why, whenever possible
- Allowing users to appeal removal of their content
- Publicly posting all Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and government takedown requests we process in a public repository in real time
- Providing structured data files for the data contained in this site
Previous transparency reports
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The nuances and challenges of moderating a code collaboration platform
Sharing the latest data update to our Transparency Center alongside a new research article on what makes moderating a code collaboration platform unique.
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Exploring an increase in circumvention claims in our transparency data
Our full year of 2023 transparency reporting data is now available and we’re taking a deep dive into how a form change caused an abrupt increase in circumvention claims.
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Full archive of transparency reports
The full archive of our previous transparency reports, posted on the GitHub Blog.