Not to say credit scores are fun, but comparing the two is kinda absurd. Credit scores are calculated by private companies and used by banks to determine your eligibility for a loan. Essentially, it’s an averaged history of how good you are at repaying debt, and it’s used to determine if you will repay future debt. The people who calculate your score have no interest in how it affects you. The social credit system is a government score and has tons of things that can affect it, and there’s plenty of opportunity for fudgery to screw you over. There are tons of ways in can negatively affect you. Worst of all, it can be used to deny international flights, and in effect your ability to escape the system. Since this is actually run by the government, it creates an avenue for punishing political dissent and control that just doesn’t exist with credit scores.
Right in the first half, extremely wrong in the second half (But you should be forgiven, we all get heavily propagandized about this stuff). What we know of the Chinese “social credit” score in the west is largely a tall tale / myth. Here, from the top of the English wikipedia article about the Chinese system:
There has been a widespread misconception that China operates a nationwide and unitary social credit “score” based on individuals’ behavior, leading to punishments if the score is too low. Media reports in the West have sometimes exaggerated or inaccurately described this concept.[4][5][6] In 2019, the central government voiced dissatisfaction with pilot cities experimenting with social credit scores. It issued guidelines clarifying that citizens could not be punished for having low scores and that punishments should only be limited to legally defined crimes and civil infractions. As a result, pilot cities either discontinued their point-based systems or restricted them to voluntary participation with no major consequences for having low scores.[4][7] According to a February 2022 report by the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS), a social credit “score” is a myth as there is “no score that dictates citizen’s place in society”.[4]
It’s still a credit score system, so it’s still one of those dumb monolithic systems a large authoritarian country implements when it can’t be bothered to keep track of it’s citizens on a qualitative level - Like FICO in the US - But it doesn’t leak outside of that context in the way we westerners are told. In fact, our myths about that probably came out of the incidents in 2019 when the central government tamped down on local abuses of the system.
Not to say credit scores are fun, but comparing the two is kinda absurd. Credit scores are calculated by private companies and used by banks to determine your eligibility for a loan. Essentially, it’s an averaged history of how good you are at repaying debt, and it’s used to determine if you will repay future debt. The people who calculate your score have no interest in how it affects you. The social credit system is a government score and has tons of things that can affect it, and there’s plenty of opportunity for fudgery to screw you over. There are tons of ways in can negatively affect you. Worst of all, it can be used to deny international flights, and in effect your ability to escape the system. Since this is actually run by the government, it creates an avenue for punishing political dissent and control that just doesn’t exist with credit scores.
Right in the first half, extremely wrong in the second half (But you should be forgiven, we all get heavily propagandized about this stuff). What we know of the Chinese “social credit” score in the west is largely a tall tale / myth. Here, from the top of the English wikipedia article about the Chinese system:
It’s still a credit score system, so it’s still one of those dumb monolithic systems a large authoritarian country implements when it can’t be bothered to keep track of it’s citizens on a qualitative level - Like FICO in the US - But it doesn’t leak outside of that context in the way we westerners are told. In fact, our myths about that probably came out of the incidents in 2019 when the central government tamped down on local abuses of the system.
The main difference is that credit score exists while the Chinese social score doesn’t.
The Social Credit doesn’t exist, FICO does. One has more impact because it’s real.