China’s creation of a social credit network
While China’s national social credit network has not yet been implemented, many smaller scale social networks are already being tested by certain cities. These networks list residents and rate them on a scale of points based on their daily actions such as their conformation to laws, regulations, and social norms. Failure to do so, results in points being subtracted from their overall score. However, conforming to laws, donating blood, and volunteer work can increase one’s social credit score. Scoring, can affect residents by resulting in punishment. Some punishments that follow a low score include “being banned from staying in a star-rated hotel, buying a house, taking a holiday, and even sending your nine-year-old daughter to a private school.” (Vicky Xiuzhong Xu and Bang Xiao). The government can even pursue freezing the assets of those that have a low score in the social credit network. Besides local governments, private organizations have also started their own scoring systems. One such scoring system is Sesame Credit, which is developed by Alibaba and uses Alipay to keep track of what people spend their money on. It then takes this data and scores people based on what they purchase. Necessary purchases such would get individuals labeled as responsible while purchases on games or lack of purchases would label people as idlers.
This social credit network also ties into the concept of weak/strong ties and positive/negative ties. An example from the article comes from the case of Zhong Pei, a student who was blacklisted and barred from enrolling university due to a tie she had. The tie came from her dad who killed two people and then died in a car accident. Since her dad was a family member, she obviously had a strong positive tie with him which resulted in her being blacklisted due to his actions. This also gives us further insight on how the system works. If you have strong ties to people with low scores, it will also affect you as well as your family since the strong ties will continue down the line. Because of the way this works, rational people would distance themselves from those with low scores which would probably result in three connected components in this network graph. These three components would be those with positive score, those with negative score, and those in between that will be balanced and be neither positive nor negative. While not necessarily ethical, China’s social credit network really gives us a good real-life example of how to analyze nodes in a network as well as their connections and the information it can provide.