The conversations are amazing
this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025
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For real imagine living in a country where a faceless entity logs all of your financial activity without your consent and distills that information to summarize a person's character into a numerical score used to lock people out of securing housing or finding work, dystopian nightmare
Edit: the removed comment said that the social credit score existed based on this Wikimedia article.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System
In the Wikipedia article itself:
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.[7][8][9] 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.[7][10] 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".[7]
It really is astounding how much every sinophobes source is inevitably just Wikipedia.
More and more I see them just sending either a duckduckgo search, or the first few links from that search, which is of course always from anglo-supremacist news sources.
I have some sources on the child and slave labor, if that helps.
https://worldwithoutgenocide.org/genocides-and-conflicts/genocide-of-the-uyghurs-in-western-china/china-tibet-and-the-uyghurs
https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/02/01/china-carmakers-implicated-uyghur-forced-labor
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/nz0g306v8c/china-tainted-cotton
This last one is ‘Western propaganda’ but is very helpful in identifying the types of products to avoid. It’s near impossible in the US, unless you make your own textiles/clothes or only buy second-hand.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ilab/reports/child-labor/list-of-goods-print
Your first link is a few paragraphs with no sources whatsoever.
The second one sources Human Rights Watch, who got bodied even on reddit the last time they tried to spread this line. They pretty much source only from Zenz (a far-right anti-semitic christian evangelical who thinks birth conrtrol is genocide).
The third link has Zenz again as its main source.
Its so exhausting to have to debunk the same recycled sources over and over, so here's a megathread:
https://dessalines.github.io/essays/socialism_faq.html#whats-going-on-with-the-uyghurs
I appreciate a someone making the effort to debunk but your megathread is absolute garbage, I checked a couple links, got redirected toward twitter and quora threads, so ty but don't spread misinformation.
So all of the nations with a free and open internet are pushing propaganda, and we should just take the firewalled nation of oppressively regulated speech at their word?
No nation should allow the US surveillance arms like Facebook, twitter, instagram, youtube and reddit to operate within their borders. These are US controlled entities that serve to push pro-US foreign policy, and hoover up all global communications.
For example, the most popular social media platform in India, is facebook. The US controls the main communication platform of a country with a population much larger than its own.
Countries should realize what a dangerous threat it is to have US companies control your social media.
It's funny that we're arguing this on a platform that's legal in the US, and banned in China. Is lemmy.ml a US surveillance op too? Are you? Am I?
To be clear, it is overwhelmingly Westerners that wish to depict a Chinese man as a yellow bear. You can talk about Pooh, just not in the way westerners tend to want to.
As for the Social Credit system, the version reported in western media is false and exaggerated. There is a credit system, but it's largely for businesses and other social entities, not some Orwellian big brother system.
When they reference Xi negatively they use Palpatine or some literary villain as a comparison. Using a yellow bear beloved by most of the world seems counter productive. Imagine if people compared Hitler to Charlie Chaplain due to likeness and not, say, Satan.