What is Social Credit and is it Censorship?

Because this is coming up across LibraryThing by a member in tangentially related threads, let's cover a few basics in this group that actually focuses on censorship.

What is "social credit"?

This term has several meanings, including the following.

1. An economic theory started by C. H. Douglas "stating that maldistribution of wealth due to insufficient purchasing power is the cause of economic depressions." (Source: Britannica on Ezra Pound's Cantos)

2. An international socioeconomic movement of the 1920s and 1930s based on that theory.

3. A minor political party in Canada founded from the movement. It last held seats in the federal parliament in 1980. In French, the name is Parti du Crédit Social. (Source: Britannica)

4. A Chinese regulatory program also known in English as the Chinese "ranking system". This is usually where the topic of censorship comes in these days. Why? What a business, governmental group, or an individual person says might restrict access to social resources such as travel options, employment, and financial services. This is because the system creates reports on "trustworthiness" not only on the subject's likelihood to pay a loan but to maintain a good social reputation. Although many people around the world are surprised (and understandably frightened) by how expansive this system is and how devastating the ratings can be in someone's life, this form of "social credit" is not entirely new. The current ranking system is said to be a more technologically advanced version of systems used in China through the area's long history. The current ranking system, however, has been expanding as more provinces adopt it. See Horizons' "China Social Credit System Explained".

5. Regulatory systems similar to China's that already exist or that are under consideration in other countries, such as the USA.

Is it censorship?

Please post your response below if you'd like.

Just to clear: This is also a good place to link to or discuss related texts, such as books, news articles, personal blogs, or political cartoons that address "social credit".

How does this relate to the FICO score now adopted by banks across the US? (Realize that a FICO score has only been around since 1956.) Because the Social Credit system sounds similar, but taking more factors into account.

>3 gilroy: This is outside my knowledge base. However, I asked some internet gods (a.k.a. search algorithms) for help.

Mercator Institute for China Studies says of China's Social Credit System:

The SoCS, which first emerged in China in the early 2000s, was inspired by credit scoring practices elsewhere in the world, such as FICO in the United States and Schufa in Germany. In the main blueprints for the system there was no reference to large-scale scoring of individuals. It did, however, spawn tangentially-related initiatives like Alibaba’s Sesame Credit, but this was only indirectly related to the SoCS and, in any case, the People’s Bank of China eventually denied the company a credit license. Only in late 2016 did the State Council – China’s top governmental body – formally refer to the idea that it would “explore the establishment of a personal integrity score management system”.

https://merics.org/en/opinion/chinas-social-credit-score-untangling-myth-reality

So FICO is said to have inspired China's current system.

Did FICO continue to inspire SoCS? Changes were also made to FICO in 2016, the year a new model for medical, rent, and collections was introduced to individual consumers.

In general, credit scores tell lenders and banks how much of a {financial} credit risk someone is based on their credit history. Specifically, FICO scores look at five different weighted factors:

Payment history (35%)
Amounts owed (30%)
Length of credit history (15%)
Credit mix (10%)
New credit (10%)

Of the five, payment history carries the most weight.

However, "unpaid doctor bills won’t count against you as much as other types of unpaid bills, such as credit cards, student loans, car loans, or mortgage payments will." That's partially because medical debt is so widespread in the USA and partially because people don't deal with the costs of medical services the same as with other forms of debt.

https://www.investopedia.com/fico-09-5072489

My question for later: What are the consequences of a low FICO score compared to a low SoCS score?

The general flavour of China's SoCS sounds familiar to me, though I was unaware of the specific program history and adaptation.

Clearly, explicit institutional efforts to implement such concepts are worrisome, based on the varied human history of coercion and repression. Systematically placing state power behind intentions, no matter how idealised or well-intended, raise the chances of abuse occurring, as well as increasing the severity of any consequences.

At the same time, these efforts concern me when implemented "informally", as well -- that is, socially or culturally, without official state sanction. And of course, frequently the efforts overlap: thinking in particular of the history of White Supremacy in the U.S., and its blend of state sanctioned efforts (e.g. Jim Crow legislation) and social norms (public lynchings).

In short, I believe these efforts can count as censorship, but also that this is but one facet of the coercion and social violence involved.

Other questions: is all social normative behavior censorship? What distinguishes censorship from social mores, cultural norms, traditions?

Over the past few years, there has been a lot of discussion back and forth in technology conferences, white papers, and journal discussions around this issue.

I'm not a participant in those discussions, so I don't know what the current outcomes of those discussions are, but there have been a number of published reports both online, and also in podcasts and broadcast interviews over the past ten years or so.

The issue is that as more data is collected, and as AI software evolves, it will become easier and more tempting to use peoples' activities to control their actions, but they (the participants and organizers of these discussions) don't want to say it out loud, so there is a lot of code-speak in their papers and announcements.

That is a similar attitude the Chinese government has about using someone's social credit score to decide if they are allowed to travel, or rent an apartment. Part of the
data used to create the score is their online activity.

Here is one (of many) explanations of the Chinese system: excerpted from https://nhglobalpartners.com/china-social-credit-system-explained/
The fundamental building block of the social credit system is data. Through the system, data is gathered and shared. ‘Big data’ algorithms are then used to process that data in a meaningful manner.

Curation of blacklists and redlists
The data acquired is used to add individuals and corporations to lists (some public, some not).

Punishments, sanctions and rewards
Based partially (but not entirely) on presence in the lists identified above, individuals are punished and rewarded.

Here is an announcement of a conference a few years ago:
https://www.internetgovernance.org/2021/03/04/call-for-papers-on-comparative-ana...

As the article in the first website (Global Partners) said, this is a wide-open field, and they are still trying to decide how to proceed. Western institutions (NGOs, corporations, and government) have a strong interest in learning from China and watching how they are doing things.

We are beginning to see the start of that development in the west:
* Big Tech deplatforms people who express views contrary to the official party line, or present unwelcome information.
* Pierre Trudeau cut off bank accounts, in the middle of winter, of people who donated to the trucker's strike in Canada last year.
* The FBI used cell phone records and credit card records to arrest people who were in DC on Jan 6.
*Agustin Carstens, who is the head of BIS (The Bank of International Settslements - the central bank of central banks) spoke of being able to track currency when Central Bank Digital Currency is in place. https://www.facebook.com/CBDCWorldNews/videos/bis-agust%C3%ADn-carstens-cbdc/330...

>1 aspirit:, "Likelihood to play a loan" is one thing - it's reasonable to track who is worth taking a risk on with your money, and have a consequence for people who are careless with yours - but a "good social reputation" measure sounds like an entirely arbitrary measure used for political control. It goes a long way beyond just censorship into a broad invasion of individual rights, i.e. exerting control over you based on how much you agree with government policy, and would not be practiced in any true democracy.

>6 margaretbartley:, I'd disagree with "the start of that development in the west"; it's always been there. Employers want their employees to toe the company line, government agencies step in to block the finances or trace the IDs of people engaging in criminal activity, etc. It's as old as the founding of these countries. New technology just gives it new flavours to play with. We have always paid a price in freedom in order to achieve security. Different democracies have drawn this line at different degrees. Canada's has always been further towards security than in the USA (e.g. gun laws.) Look at the 'wild west' history of the United States in comparison to the western expansion of federal Canada; completely different histories. Canada has always preferred more law and order in the hands of authorities.

A tough balance is being navigated in Canada, for example, between too much and too little government tracking of private information. Some government databases have been disassembled after an outcry that too much personal information was being centralized and shared between government channels. But on the other hand, there are citizen complaints about having to enter the same information about themselves through multiple government channels and how this impedes convenience, speed of service, etc. They want their government to serve them well and look after them, but without being scary about it. Probably will never make everyone happy.

Estonian citizens have had ID cards for about twenty years now and it's provided all sorts of conveniences without arousing protests about government snooping or control. There's a great deal of international interest in this model, but it would be difficult to move to that from an existing system. Estonia started with nothing when it achieved independence circa 1990 and set this system as their goal immediately, thus its success. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_identity_card