6 ms·

The fun part will be extending it to track and apply to foreigners, even outside of China. It's a very small thing to make people second-guess a critical blog

The fun part will be extending it to track and apply to foreigners, even outside of China. It's a very small thing to make people second-guess a critical blog post or Reddit comment about China in case they ever want to visit or do business with a company that has any Chinese presence.

tivert 8y ago
> The fun part will be extending it to track and apply to foreigners, even outside of China. > It's a very small thing to make people second-guess a critical blog post or Reddit comment about China in case they ever want to visit or do business with a company that has any Chinese presence. That would be difficult to extend to activity in non-cooperative regimes. China has been working to de-anonymize internet access by making phone numbers traceable to national ID numbers, network connections/IP addresses traceable to phone numbers [1], and forum posts traceable to IP addresses. I think it's unlikely that they'd be able to automatically trace a pseudonymous post on reddit made by an American in the US to a particular US passport number to factor reddit posts into a social credit score at a large scale. However, they might be able to do it for public posts on a real-name policy site like Facebook. With facial recognition and a real name, they could probably reliably match an account to a passport to sanction posts they dislike. They'd probably be fine with any false positives due to fake accounts, etc. [1] e.g. to connect to airport wifi, the landing page asks for your (local) cell number, and texts you a code for access.
- godelski 8y ago
  Most people reuse usernames.
  - tivert 8y ago
    That kinda misses the point. Pseudo-anonymous accounts can be doxxed based on personal idiosyncrasies (like username reuse), but not at scale (yet).
seanmcdirmid 8y ago
Foreigners generally don’t appear at all in Chinese credit systems, to the point that we can’t get credit cards on our own even if we have a lots of money in the bank and a continuing direct deposit. I really shouldn’t be using my real name on HN, however.
PavlovsCat 8y ago
I think it goes deeper than even criticism vs. suppressing criticism. That is, that it's less about what ideas people fall in line with, but that they aren't making them on their own and with each other, and that they get used to that. > Contrary to previous understandings, posts with negative, even vitriolic, criticism of the state, its leaders, and its policies are not more likely to be censored. Instead, we show that the censorship program is aimed at curtailing collective action by silencing comments that represent, reinforce, or spur social mobilization, regardless of content. https://gking.harvard.edu/publications/how-Censorship-China-Allows-Government-Criticism-Silences-Collective-Expression https://gking.harvard.edu/publications/how-Censorship-China-... > Our results offer rigorous support for the recent hypothesis that criticisms of the state, its leaders, and their policies are published, whereas posts about real-world events with collective action potential are censored. https://gking.harvard.edu/publications/randomized-experimental-study-censorship-china https://gking.harvard.edu/publications/randomized-experiment... > The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate. -- Noam Chomsky > Within the affluent democracy, the affluent discussion prevails, and within the established framework, it is tolerant to a large extent. All points of view can be heard: the Communist and the Fascist, the Left and the Right, the white and the Negro, the crusaders for armament and for disarmament. Moreover, in endlessly dragging debates over the media, the stupid opinion is treated with the same respect as the intelligent one, the misinformed may talk as long as the informed, and propaganda rides along with education, truth with falsehood. This pure toleration of sense and nonsense is justified by the democratic argument that nobody, neither group nor individual, is in possession of the truth and capable of defining what is right and wrong, good and bad. Therefore, all contesting opinions must be submitted to 'the people' for its deliberation and choice. But I have already suggested that the democratic argument implies a necessary condition, namely, that the people must be capable of deliberating and choosing on the basis of knowledge, that they must have access to authentic information, and that, on this. basis, their evaluation must be the result of autonomous thought. -- Herbert Marcuse, "Repressive Tolerance" (1965) Individual capable of critical thought and coherent mental models is kind of the pre-requisite for whatever groups do or fail to do. It's a chicken-and-egg thing, in a way, because such invididuals depend on society to be given the tools for that, or to at least not be suppressed when they build them from scratch. But a group made up of individuals who can't hold their own individual ground, will not fare better by multiplying that in the group, and giving individuals even less reason to think things through. The end results is people who can "support" this or that, but cannot act. They can choose, but not make. They can join, but not face. I don't think that is an accident or a mistake, and people who are saying something like "1984 wasn't a manual" are sadly mistaken, because it is also a manual, it cannot help but be. Just like knowledge of medicine, knowing how to heal a person, is also knowledge on how to harm them. The trouble is when the abuse of insights overcomes the use of them.

tivert 8y ago

> The fun part will be extending it to track and apply to foreigners, even outside of China. > It's a very small thing to make people second-guess a critical blog post or Reddit comment about China in case they ever want to visit or do business with a company that has any Chinese presence. That would be difficult to extend to activity in non-cooperative regimes. China has been working to de-anonymize internet access by making phone numbers traceable to national ID numbers, network connections/IP addresses traceable to phone numbers [1], and forum posts traceable to IP addresses. I think it's unlikely that they'd be able to automatically trace a pseudonymous post on reddit made by an American in the US to a particular US passport number to factor reddit posts into a social credit score at a large scale. However, they might be able to do it for public posts on a real-name policy site like Facebook. With facial recognition and a real name, they could probably reliably match an account to a passport to sanction posts they dislike. They'd probably be fine with any false positives due to fake accounts, etc. [1] e.g. to connect to airport wifi, the landing page asks for your (local) cell number, and texts you a code for access.

godelski 8y ago
Most people reuse usernames.
- tivert 8y ago
  That kinda misses the point. Pseudo-anonymous accounts can be doxxed based on personal idiosyncrasies (like username reuse), but not at scale (yet).

seanmcdirmid 8y ago

Foreigners generally don’t appear at all in Chinese credit systems, to the point that we can’t get credit cards on our own even if we have a lots of money in the bank and a continuing direct deposit. I really shouldn’t be using my real name on HN, however.

PavlovsCat 8y ago

I think it goes deeper than even criticism vs. suppressing criticism. That is, that it's less about what ideas people fall in line with, but that they aren't making them on their own and with each other, and that they get used to that. > Contrary to previous understandings, posts with negative, even vitriolic, criticism of the state, its leaders, and its policies are not more likely to be censored. Instead, we show that the censorship program is aimed at curtailing collective action by silencing comments that represent, reinforce, or spur social mobilization, regardless of content. https://gking.harvard.edu/publications/how-Censorship-China-Allows-Government-Criticism-Silences-Collective-Expression https://gking.harvard.edu/publications/how-Censorship-China-... > Our results offer rigorous support for the recent hypothesis that criticisms of the state, its leaders, and their policies are published, whereas posts about real-world events with collective action potential are censored. https://gking.harvard.edu/publications/randomized-experimental-study-censorship-china https://gking.harvard.edu/publications/randomized-experiment... > The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate. -- Noam Chomsky > Within the affluent democracy, the affluent discussion prevails, and within the established framework, it is tolerant to a large extent. All points of view can be heard: the Communist and the Fascist, the Left and the Right, the white and the Negro, the crusaders for armament and for disarmament. Moreover, in endlessly dragging debates over the media, the stupid opinion is treated with the same respect as the intelligent one, the misinformed may talk as long as the informed, and propaganda rides along with education, truth with falsehood. This pure toleration of sense and nonsense is justified by the democratic argument that nobody, neither group nor individual, is in possession of the truth and capable of defining what is right and wrong, good and bad. Therefore, all contesting opinions must be submitted to 'the people' for its deliberation and choice. But I have already suggested that the democratic argument implies a necessary condition, namely, that the people must be capable of deliberating and choosing on the basis of knowledge, that they must have access to authentic information, and that, on this. basis, their evaluation must be the result of autonomous thought. -- Herbert Marcuse, "Repressive Tolerance" (1965) Individual capable of critical thought and coherent mental models is kind of the pre-requisite for whatever groups do or fail to do. It's a chicken-and-egg thing, in a way, because such invididuals depend on society to be given the tools for that, or to at least not be suppressed when they build them from scratch. But a group made up of individuals who can't hold their own individual ground, will not fare better by multiplying that in the group, and giving individuals even less reason to think things through. The end results is people who can "support" this or that, but cannot act. They can choose, but not make. They can join, but not face. I don't think that is an accident or a mistake, and people who are saying something like "1984 wasn't a manual" are sadly mistaken, because it is also a manual, it cannot help but be. Just like knowledge of medicine, knowing how to heal a person, is also knowledge on how to harm them. The trouble is when the abuse of insights overcomes the use of them.