ISSUES
: The Internet of Things
Chapter 2: Our digital future
31
China has made obedience to the State
a game
China has created a social tool which gives people a score for how good a citizen
they are.
By Samuel Osborne
W
ith a concept straight out of a cyberpunk
dystopia, China has gamified obedience to
the State.
China has created a social tool named Sesame Credit
which gives people a score for how good a citizen they are.
The system measures how obediently citizens follow
the party line, pulling data from social networks and
online purchase histories.
As Extra Credits explains on YouTube: “If you post
pictures of Tiananmen Square or share a link about the
recent stock market collapse, your Sesame Credit goes
down.
“Share a link from the state-sponsored news agency
about how good the economy is doing and your score
goes up.”
Similarly, Sesame Credit can analyse data from online
purchases.
“If you’re making purchases the state deems valuable,
like work shoes or local agricultural products, your
score goes up.
“If you import anime from Japan though, down the
score goes.”
Most insidious of all, the app will have real world
consequences. According to Extra Credits, high scores
will grant users benefits: “Like making it easier to get
the paperwork you need to travel or making it easier to
get a loan.”
Although the ratings are currently optional, the social
tool will become mandatory by 2020.
There have even been rumours about implementing
penalties for low scores: “Like slower Internet speeds,
or restricting jobs a low-scoring person is allowed to
hold.”
The system could also become a powerful tool for
social conditioning, as users could lose points for
having friends with low obedience scores.
There has already been some evidence of
Chinese citizens competing with one another
to get high scores, posting their Sesame
Credit scores on Weibo, the Chinese
equivalent of Twitter, Quartz reports.
Earlier this year, theBBC reported theChinese
Government was building a “social credit”
system to rate each citizen’s trustworthiness.
A planning document from China’s State
Council explained the credit will “forge
a public opinion environment that trust-
keeping is glorious” and warned the “new
system will reward those who report acts
of breach of trust”.
22 December 2015
Ö
Ö
The above information is reprinted with
kind permission from
The Independent
.
Please visit
for
further information.
© independent.co.uk 2016
“If you’re making purchases the state
deems valuable, like work shoes
or local agricultural products, your
score goes up... If you import anime
from Japan though, down the score
goes”
