Facebook Rolls Out Chinese-Inspired Social Credit Score For Users

This is splashed across the front page of the Drudge Report right now:

“The rating system was revealed in a report by the Washington Post, 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.”

Earlier this year, Facebook admitted it was rolling out trust ratings for media outlets.

This involved ranking news websites based on the quality of the news they were reporting.

This rating would then be used to decide which posts should be promoted higher in users’ News Feeds. …”

Just yesterday, President Trump reiterated the comments he made on Twitter and warned Facebook that censorship was “a very dangerous thing”:

“President Trump attacked social media platforms for censoring their users in an exclusive interview with Reuters today.

“I won’t mention names but when they take certain people off of Twitter or Facebook and they’re making that decision, that is really a dangerous thing because that could be you tomorrow,” the president told Reuters.

“I think it’s a very dangerous thing when they are their own regulator in terms of who’s going to be on Facebook and who’s going to be on Twitter. I think that whether it’s conservative or liberal, I think that it’s very dangerous.” …”

Something has to give here.

Big Tech has to either be regulated or broken up. The sheer amount of criticism about censorship alone is going to stop scores of users from engaging with these platforms.