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China Bans 23 Million From Buying Travel Tickets as Part of 'Social Credit' System (theguardian.com)
China blocked 23 million "discredited" travelers from buying plane or train tickets last year as part of the country's controversial "social credit" system aimed at improving the behavior of citizens. From a report: According to the National Public Credit Information Centre's 2018 report, 17.5 million people were banned from buying flights and 5.5 million barred from purchasing high-speed train tickets because of social credit offences. The report released last week said: "Once discredited, limited everywhere." The social credit system aims to incentivize "trustworthy" behavior through penalties as well as rewards. According to a government document about the system dating from 2014, the aim is to "allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step." Social credit offenses range from not paying individual taxes or fines to spreading false information and taking drugs.
Everybody keeps throwing around all of these ways that China could abuse this system, like discrediting based on social media post or publishing dissenting material. Thing is, they haven't implemented anything like that. So far the only thing that dings your score is criminal charges, traffic violations, and defaulting on loans. So it's like a cross between a criminal record and a credit score. Not very dystopian.
The big problem I'm seeing here is that it digs people into a hole. If a person is defaulting on loans too much, they end up in a situation where paying off future loans becomes more difficult. That seems counter productive.
Google has been using this model for YouTube for over a year now. Twitter and Facebook too. Blacklists are back around the world as a way to exercise power.
You're either being sarcastic or overlooking the current Muslim detention camps:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/16/world/asia/xinjiang-china-forced-labor-camps-uighurs.html
No fly list...
I'm sorry but please explain how any of those stops someone from getting on a train, bus, boat, or airplane in America?
If you get listed in China's social score system, you can still use (regular) train, bus, and boat; you cannot travel by airplane or high-speed train, so the article title exaggerates the situation. Such practice is not unique to mainland China; in Hongkong, long before the hand-over, a bankrupted person cannot take taxi for example. In China, there's no such thing as personal bankruptcy and things like jaywalking, evading debt, etc. are rampant. While their social credit system may be abused, so is the US legal system, e.g. ones who use drug are jailed for long time, whereas the drug users in China may just be banned from flying airplanes and taking high-speed trains.
Everybody keeps throwing around all of these ways that China could abuse this system, like discrediting based on social media post or publishing dissenting material. Thing is, they haven't implemented anything like that. So far the only thing that dings your score is criminal charges, traffic violations, and defaulting on loans. So it's like a cross between a criminal record and a credit score. Not very dystopian. .
That's not true.
Simply being friends with someone with a low civic score on social media DOES give you a lower civic score. Time spent playing video games (at least when connected to servers that they can monitor) DOES lower your civic score. Having comments censored DOES lower your civic score.
It IS very dystopian and they ARE abusing the system already.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch