Microsoft under pressure to resist Chinese censorship of worker protest

Microsoft is under pressure to resist Chinese censorship demands after tech workers in the country began using its code-sharing platform to protest being over-worked.

Employees at Microsoft are signing a petition in support of a protest group called 996.ICU, formed by Chinese tech workers on the company's code repository website GitHub.

The name of the group is "a reference to the gruelling and illegal working hours of many tech companies in China - from 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week" according to the petition.

"By following the '996' work schedule, you are risking yourself getting into the ICU (Intensive Care Unit)," explained the group itself.

The point of the protest was to force Chinese tech companies to obey labour laws in the country, and to allow workers to communicate with each other and share their stories.

The 996 schedule is commonplace in the country's tech sector and has even been applauded by the chief executive of Alibaba, Jack Ma.

Mr Ma, estimated to have a personal worth of roughly £30bn, called 996 a "huge blessing" and claimed that China's rapid economic growth had caused workers to become lazy.

Many of his staff members do not agree, however, and the protest group repository has been shared more than 250,000 times by sympathetic observers.

Because GitHub is used to share code between technology workers, there would be no way for the Chinese government to block the individual repository (and thus the workers' message) without blocking the whole of the site, which would cause a lot of difficulty for Chinese technology companies.

However, the ability to block the individual repository is held by Microsoft, which already censors its search engine Bing in accordance with Chinese government's demands.

The signatories to the petition write: "We must entertain the possibility that Microsoft and GitHub will be pressured to remove the repository.

"We encourage Microsoft and GitHub to keep the 996.ICU GitHub repository uncensored and available to everyone."

Engineers from companies other than Microsoft have signed the petition, including from Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Chinese companies, but GitHub remains a Microsoft property.

The Microsoft protest follows reports that Google is seeking Chinese government approval for a mobile search service called Dragonfly, that would censor some websites and search terms.

In response, Google staff also expressed their concerns that their work would be used to facilitate human rights abuses rather than enable access to information.