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The Chinese government has announced a new universal reputation score, tied to every person in the country's nation ID number and based on such factors as political compliance, hobbies, shopping, and whether you play videogames.
It's a perfect storm of terrible: the program will be administered by Alibaba (China's answer to Amazon) and Tencent (the country's huge, government-compliant social network). Your score will be generated not only by your activities, but by the activities of the friends in your social graph -- the people you identify as friends on social media. Your score will be decremented for doing things like mentioning Tienanmen Square or speculating on official corruption, or for participating in activities that the state wishes to "nudge" you away from, like playing video-games.
All scores are public to everyone, and high-scoring individuals will get privileges denied to their less fortunate peers, such as permits to visit (or live) in Singapore (you can't make this # up). Already, some Chinese people are embracing their scores as bragworthy.
China's new "Citizen Scores" will rate every person in the country
originally posted by: ChaoticOrder
a reply to: pointr97
The social credit system and its similarities to Black Mirror have been discussed several times, this thread is more about that video as it does a great job of showing how the system actually works.
originally posted by: ChaoticOrder
a reply to: Wookiep
I've seen this ep of Black Mirror and it was very good. It's worth mentioning that something like this is already underway in China. Post something bad on the internet and you lose credit... even just having friends with a low score in your social network will lower your score. I've read that by 2020 the credit system will be mandatory for all people in China. The parallels to this episode are remarkable, I suspect it was their inspiration.