Social Credit Score

In my media analysis class today, we watch an episode on social media from a well-known tv show called Black Mirror. It was called Nosedive where it is a society that everyone has a social media score and the higher the score the more perks you get like flying privileges and discounts on houses. It was super weird to watch people giving each other five stars just to raise their score and have people love them. It also worked vis versa with when people do just something small like break up with someone they get one star which lowers their score and people treat lower star people like they aren’t human. It almost made me sick to think that this could actually be something in the future.

To my surprise the professor pulled up a article about how this is already a thing in China. People get a social credit score in which everyone can see their score and judge them. It is supposed to detect how big of a threat they are, but they said that low score people can’t even fly or purchase property. Like how is this a thing that we are given a score and people with low scores are treated like outcasts.

What amazes me more is that this is kind of already a thing in America. Maybe not the score, but we see it every day where people that are known with social media or celebrities get things at discounted prices. They walk into a restaurant and are given the best table in the building just because they are well known. I’ll be honest I hope it never gets so bad that we do have a social credit score because then the world would just be a mess. Well that is all I have to say about that, I am hoping that this is just a Black Mirror episode and that the China social credit score doesn’t travel any farther because that is honestly not a society I would want to live in.