Being a frequent viewer of Extra Credits on YouTube, I occasionally find a gem in their videos. This one, posted yesterday, scares the snot out of me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sI.

Synopsis

China is producing a "game" that works like our credit scores, but involving patriotism, in real life. Citizens get "points" (like a credit score) for supporting the Government and its works or ideals. The truly nasty part of this is "association." Associate with citizens that have low score and your own score will go down. Keep good scores and get "perks", like quicker government paperwork, better jobs, and nice real life stuff like that.

Basically, they follow your links and online communications in order to figure the score.

Scarey stuff, indeed!

PS: Remember, keep politics out of the discussion, please. I was tempted to make a corollary myself

Step by step.

That′s all I will say...

Some of the reporting of this has been a bit confused. This article explains things: https://www.techinasia.com/china-citizen-scores-credit-system-orwellian

It is true that the Chinese government is on a big anti-corruption drive, which involves some kind of measurement of "integrity" (which gets mistranslated as "sincerity" for some reason) which is aimed at organizations and also individuals. The article above links to the State Council planning document describing it. It's not related to private credit-score systems like Sesame.

As part of this they are regulating the internet more and more -- there's a big conference on regarding this at the moment in Beijing and the cops are being really harsh with journalists covering it. They are going really hard after bloggers too.

Someone in Turkey is in big trouble for comparing the President to Gollum, someone in Thailand is in trouble for making fun of the King's dog, in Saudi they are whipping bloggers and in Bangladesh they are just killing them with machetes. In France they have been using emergency powers to go after people, in Britain they have the "snooper's charter", Donald Trump is rambling about shutting down parts of the internet though he doesn't seem to understsand how it works.

I think generally the internet is tightening up. Even Tor is having problems lately. Strangely all this surveillance and repression doesn't seem to stop data thefts or terrorist attacks though...

Look up I2P, Freenet, and Bitmessage. They are far from the only examples of their kind, though they're probably the most notable ones.

Gee. One could almost think those things are orchestrated from the very same source that are tightening it for regular people as an excuse to tighten it even more