About · Method · License

About this project

This is the capstone site of a 2026 TWNIC The non-profit that manages Taiwan's domain names and IP addresses. community program — “To Censor, or to Resist Censorship? The ‘open-the-box’ dilemma of online platforms.” Using Matters.town's own platform governance as the case study, it explains spam moderation, ranking algorithms, and censorship resistance to the general public, policy stakeholders, and developers. We took this on because few platforms in Taiwan are willing to disclose these inner workings — yet only by understanding them first can the public go on to debate “platform governance.”

Method & sources

The site is based on a 14-chapter research report that combines document analysis with fieldwork. The main “field” is the platform's open-source code; it also draws on internal operational history, public talk transcripts, in-depth user interviews, the lead researcher's own essays, and regulatory documents from Taiwan's National Communications Commission (NCC). The sources cross-check one another and are cited throughout; sensitive material is de-identified and abstracted under a layered principle.

License

Censorship-resistant access

This site is deployed on both GitHub Pages and distributed storage (IPFS): even if the domain is blocked, the content fingerprint survives — the deliverable itself demonstrates censorship resistance.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the TWNIC community program for its support, and to every Matters user we interviewed (quoted anonymously).