I will probably do that. But do you realize that the first app she opens isn’t from the state? It’s sesame credit from alibaba/alipay. It’s a private bonus credit thing/loyalty program from a private company. It has nothing to do with the state. If you go on a shopping spree in their apps then your credit rises and you may get a few gifts.
I just read more about it, specifically here: https://thechinaproject.com/2022/02/03/how-chinas-laws-and-social-credit-system-actually-work-explained-by-jeremy-daum/ from 2022, and it seems at the time there were pilot projects to do something like a real social credit score system.
What it really is, is sort of a regulatory credit check system. It’s primarily aimed at businesses, not at individuals. And social credit is pretty routinely defined as a measure of people’s compliance with laws and legal obligations. So, it’s not a holistic measure of all your behavior. It’s not an algorithmic formulation based on what you did online, what you bought, who your friends are, what you said, what you posted about. It measures whether or not you’ve received administrative punishments, criminal punishments, whether you’ve applied for permits, or a registered a business, things like this.
So, most of the information going into it is what they call public credit information, which is information created or collected by the government in the course of its normal business. So that’s to say that the creation of the idea of the Social Credit System didn’t involve collecting much more information.
What it did involve was sharing information between regulatory agencies, and they’re now making it so that if you violated say a food safety law… In the past, you might… The food safety regulators would know that that had happened, but it’s now available for the public to see in most cases. And also, other regulatory agencies will see this.
What I strongly disagree with though is the dramatized and biased view your video approaches the topic with. Analyzing these things should be sober, not like that. I couldn’t watch past the first few seconds. “Do we have no privacy? (in response to filming themselves for a year) We don’t have any anyway (to point out the evil state monitoring their every move)”
to be fair the social credit score as it is imagined by westerners with AIs tracking your every move to make a number go up or down that determines your standing in society is fiction. What does exist are two separate systems; one for creditworthiness like all creditworthiness systems around the world and another system that leaves you on a blacklist if you intentionally don’t pay off your debts. that system can actually prevent you from taking high speed rail (among other things i can’t remember), and some people who are not very aware of the world may have gotten into debt, didn’t notice, didn’t pay their debts, got blacklisted and only noticed when they tried to take the high speed rail somewhere.
to be fair to critics of china too, this (meaning this lemmy post and other political persecution up to possible genocide) is absolutely terrible and inexcusable. i sincerely detest nationalism, but that’s what the ccp leadership wants, using many means, and I can’t square that circle.
I’m sure the blacklisting system has been abused before too. i just don’t interact a lot with chinese news and the chinese internet, and i might not even be able to check if i did try. i know there was that boxer who beat up martial artists who was on the blacklist system, but I don’t know if that was from debt or from persecution. i know the general media vibe here in the west was persecution, but there’s no way I’m going to trust vibes about that.
I’m autistic and have an oversized amygdala but that doesn’t stop me from being leftist. I just feel compassion for everyone human. Still struggling with the compassion for animals that I eat.