This is old news, but there are always new stories appearing everyday about China's social credit score program. Basically, citizens there get tracked 24/7 to the fullest extent possible, whether they show up on cctv, internet and phone activity, or just simply public records. They are assigned a score based on how they behave in society, with people who don't agree with government policies or do something frivilous, like jaywalking, get their score knocked down.
Lower scores have an impact, not only on the person affected, but on their friends, family, an even associations. Lower scores can keep people off of airplanes, high-speed trains, and even prevent their kids from ever going to a decent college.
https://pacific.epeak.in/2018/09/18/...al-management/
In a country like China, where all sorts of ridiculous things get routinely banned from the internet, like whinny the pooh, and even the phrase, "I disagree", and tech companies like Google even have to set custom web filters to remove any traces of certain topics, like the Dalai Llama, we might rightfully expect this kind of thing.
https://reason.com/archives/2018/08/...h-movie-is-ban
But we are heading for an era where the US might not be far behind. With companies like Facebook already rolling out their own versions of a social score, I think we are going to see this integrated into our personal lives in scary ways.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/techn...=.e5d3d7ea21ea
Us Americans usually are on the side of free speech, freedom of thought, and freedom of religion. But what will happen when our ability to get a driver's license depends on our ideas and beliefs, instead of our ability to safely drive on the roads? What will happen when my view of politics or religion makes it so my kids can't go to college? And what if I do my best to maintain a perfect score for my kid's future, but someone my kid talks to at school brings all of my family's scores down?
The implications go on and on. These days, anything you do on any social media account is reviewed by a potential employer. Even your credit score is considered. It's not a far stretch to see the social media companies all rolling out social score programs, and those will be quietly but actively affecting our whole lives. It will become a mundane, everyday expectation after a little while, and the government will even start to rely on the numbers for their business with us, or worse, come up with their own official social score system.
I doubt bringing this to anyone's attention will change anything, and people who don't use social media won't care. But if our government decides us forum posters spend too long online every day and they turn off our internet, that would raise some hackles.
What do y'all think? Do you see us becoming a censored nation(more than we already are)? Would you care what your social score was? Would you cut ties with friends and family, or move to a better neighborhood, to keep your score higher?