REAL LIFE NEWS: PEOPLE OF ‘BAD CHARACTER’ MAY BE BANNED FROM TRAINS IN CHINA
by Hazed
A new social credit system in China could punish ‘bad citizens’ by stopping them from using public transport or taking flights. Secret algorithms will be used to check social media posts and distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ citizens, adding names to a government list of troublemakers.
Those who get blacklisted are likely to include people who post on social media anything that the ruling Communist Party doesn’t like, as well as those found to have committed financial wrongdoing.
Under the social credit system, citizens will be scored based on perceived trustworthiness. The scores can move up or down over time, although President Xi Jinping has outlined a principle of “once untrustworthy, always restricted” which implies that it will be easier for your score to get lower than higher!
It will apparently be mandatory for all citizens of the People’s Republic of China to take part in the social credit scheme, which will be completed by 2020 (although you can bet that the President and the officials of the ruling Communist Party of China will be exempt). This is bound to have a massive chilling effect on free speech, since the easiest way to ensure you are not labelled as a bad citizen will be to never post on social media. Which may be one of the goals of the scheme, of course.
Leaving aside the human rights issues of such a scheme, there is a big problem with secret algorithms running as a ‘black box’ which cannot be inspected. Who knows what kind of behaviour the machines will deem to be unacceptable? Presumably there will be no appeal from this social credit system. Frightening.
