Thread by @realism_fan

The kind of social credit system that people are talking about doesn't even exist in China.

Most people think of the Chinese social credit system as being "like a credit score but for your social behavior instead of finances". Except it actually is about finances.

(thread)

https://twitter.com/bog_beef/status/1716805335057416505

China was late to the game on creating a financial credit score system, and by the time they got to the mid 2000s, it was a big problem for regional banks to figure out which companies and individuals were safe to borrow money.

There were a lot of heavily indebted and delinquent companies and entrepreneurs that were still able to borrow money. So they developed the social credit system to try to implement an Equifax/TransUnion style credit score system.

The word "social" is there not because the system *focuses* on non-financial activity, but because the government wanted to imply that wanton financial untrustworthiness is anti-social.

According to the most recent reports, the vast majority of the negative judgements made under the system are toward *companies*, not individuals. Only 0.15-0.3% of individuals have received any negative judgements under the system, and it's all for financial untrustworthiness.

The most common reason someone gets a judgement under the system is because they do not pay their debts even when they have the means to do so. This is who is being targeted when they put people on "no fly" or "no train ride" blacklists.

(source: )merics.org/en/report/chin…

Now, there have been some "experiments" by individual cities into creating social credit systems for non-financial behavior, but none of these systems involve a numerical score, they only involve a note that would show up if a bank or company requested a background check.

And these behaviors are largely things that you'd get a ticket for in the west, or maybe a minor criminal conviction, such as DUI, having a fake ID, not sorting garbage correctly, disruptive behavior on the subway, etc. Things that could show up on a background check in the west.

However, none of those experiments have actually been integrated into a single national system, and many have already been abandoned. Not only that, but the CCP issued a ruling in 2019 that numerical scores cannot be used for punishment under any circumstances.

So what to make of all this?

In general, the spectre of the "Social Credit Score" system in the west is not really a reflection of the reality in China, but is really a reflection of our own ambiguous anxieties about technology in the west.

Because China is so linguistically and culturally cut off from the west, there isn't very much detailed knowledge of what life is like in China.

You don't actually get points for posting pro-government propaganda in China, but it's easy to believe that it could be true.

China is almost a mythological entity in the western mind, about which anything could be true and anything can be said, because who can really check? Who can really be sure? Who in the west can easily access a Chinese netizen to ask them what it is like to live there?

IMO, believing in false myths about the Chinese Social Credit system reflects anxieties within us westerners about our own societies, and the punishments that our regimes would love to mete out against us for not approving of their psychopathic schemes.