FACEBOOK ‘TRUST RATINGS’ FOR USERS… COMMUNIST ‘SOCIAL CREDIT SCORE’… ALGORITHM FLAGS BEHAVIOR

SOCIAL SCORE – Facebook has TRUST ratings for users – but it won’t tell you your score

FACEBOOK is rating users based on how “trustworthy” it thinks they are.

Users receive a score on a scale from zero to one that determines if they have a good or bad reputation – but it’s completely hidden.

The rating system was revealed in a report by the Washington Post – and later confirmed by Facebook to The Sun – which says it’s in place to “help identify malicious actors”.

Facebook tracks your behaviour across its site and uses that info to assign you a rating.

Tessa Lyons, who heads up Facebook’s fight against fake news, said: “One of the signals we use is how people interact with articles.

“For example, if someone previously gave us feedback that an article was false and the article was confirmed false by a fact-checker, then we might weight that person’s future false news feedback more than someone who indiscriminately provides false news feedback on lots of articles, including ones that end up being rated as true.”

If Facebook were transparent about this stuff, users — the network’s actual content providers and creators — could work to improve trust.

But that kind of openness just isn’t in the company’s DNA, says Frederic Filloux on Monday Note:

Facebook’s DNA is based on the unchallenged power of an exceptional but morally flawed — or at least dangerously immature — leader who sees the world as a gigantic monetization playground. In Mark Zuckerberg’s world, the farther from home, the more leeway he feels to experiment with whatever comes to his prolific mind. Yielding on the Ford Pinto syndrome, he feels little incentive to correct the misuse of the tools he created. And he managed to have no one standing against him.

It’s a fascinating article, and I recommend reading the whole thing.

China Assigns Every Citizen A ‘Social Credit Score’ To Identify Who Is And Isn’t Trustworthy

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Country Determines Your Standing Through Use Of Surveillance Video, Plans To Have 600 Million Cameras By 2020

BEIJING (CBSNewYork) — China is rolling out a high-tech plan to give all of its 1.4 billion citizens a personal score, based on how they behave.

But there are consequences if a score gets too low, and for some that’s cause for concern, CBS2’s Ben Tracy reported Tuesday.

When Liu Hu recently tried to book a flight, he was told he was banned from flying because he was on the list of untrustworthy people. Liu is a journalist who was ordered by a court to apologize for a series of tweets he wrote and was then told his apology was insincere.

“I can’t buy property. My child can’t go to a private school,” he said. “You feel you’re being controlled by the list all the time.”

And the list is now getting longer as every Chinese citizen is being assigned a social credit score — a fluctuating rating based on a range of behaviors. It’s believed that community service and buying Chinese-made products can raise your score. Fraud, tax evasion and smoking in non-smoking areas can drop it.

Who needs democracy when you have data?

  • People in Beijing are always under the watchful eye of Mao—and myriad surveillance cameras.

In 1955, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov published a short story about an experiment in “electronic democracy,” in which a single citizen, selected to represent an entire population, responded to questions generated by a computer named Multivac. The machine took this data and calculated the results of an election that therefore never needed to happen. Asimov’s story was set in Bloomington, Indiana, but today an approximation of Multivac is being built in China.

For any authoritarian regime, “there is a basic problem for the center of figuring out what’s going on at lower levels and across society,” says Deborah Seligsohn, a political scientist and China expert at Villanova University in Philadelphia. How do you effectively govern a country that’s home to one in five people on the planet, with an increasingly complex economy and society, if you don’t allow public debate, civil activism, and electoral feedback? How do you gather enough information to actually make decisions? And how does a government that doesn’t invite its citizens to participate still engender trust and bend public behavior without putting police on every doorstep?

Hu Jintao, China’s leader from 2002 to 2012, had attempted to solve these problems by permitting a modest democratic thaw, allowing avenues for grievances to reach the ruling class. His successor, Xi Jinping, has reversed that trend. Instead, his strategy for understanding and responding to what is going on in a nation of 1.4 billion relies on a combination of surveillance, AI, and big data to monitor people’s lives and behavior in minute detail.

 

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