A Chinese government memo states: "Keeping trust is glorious, and breaking trust is disgraceful," setting forth the guiding principle of the nation's planned social-credit system. The idea is to reward good citizenship and punish bad. Follow the rules, and you can obtain an expedited travel permit, a starred dating-app profile, or a cheaper hotel room.
In the West, we are moving closer to a form of tech-enabled totalitarianism
- On Capitol Hill, a bipartisan group of legislators is seeking nothing less than the end of fully encrypted electronic communication
- The Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies (EARN IT) Act would allow the mere offering of strong encryption to be used as evidence of an intent to enable, or allow, the spread of CSAM
- To avoid liability, messaging services would have to break encryption and monitor customers' communications.
Five years ago, the ingredients for the construction of a social-credit system were not yet in place
- The advance of surveillance technology, the migration of daily activities to Internet-based platforms, and the demise of cash had not reached a critical threshold.
- Now that has changed
- American constitutional protections remain strong. The government can’t simply force social-media websites to censor speech; the First Amendment bars it from doing so
- If the deeper concern is not the designs of government but the behavior of private companies, then citizens should be relieved
- With blockchain technology, a peer-to-peer network of computers can safely store data on a distributed ledger.
https://www.city-journal.org/creeping-censorship-on-digital-platforms
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