RUSH: I have two stories that I want to share with you, backed up one after the other. Ready? First story headline: “China Assigns Every Citizen a ‘Social Credit Score’ to Identify Who Is and Who Is Not Trustworthy.” The ChiComs are “rolling out a high-tech plan to give all of its 1.4 billion citizens a personal score, based on how they behave. But there are consequences if a score gets too low, and for some that’s cause for concern, CBS2’s Ben Tracy reported Tuesday.”
Now the personal example part of the story: “When Liu Hu recently tried to book a flight, he was told he was banned from flying because he was on the list of untrustworthy people. Liu is a journalist who was ordered by a court to apologize for a series of tweets he wrote and was then told his apology was insincere. ‘I can’t buy property. My child can’t go to a private school,’ he said. ‘You feel you’re being controlled by the list all the time.’
“And the list is now getting longer as every [ChiCom] citizen is being assigned a social credit score — a fluctuating rating based on a range of behaviors. It’s believed that community service and buying Chinese-made products can raise your score. Fraud, tax evasion and smoking in non-smoking areas can drop” your score. Now, who is doing the monitoring here? Well, that would be the ChiCom government.
The ChiCom government is basically studying every citizen and — unbeknownst to them until recently — scoring them on their proper communist behavior. And if their scores get low then they can’t travel, they can’t leave home, they can’t have children in some cases — and in some cases they can’t buy property, and if they do have kids they may not be able to send them to private school. Okay. That’s the ChiComs, studying every citizen and assigning them not a sexual gender — oh, no! — a behavioral score.
Next story. Headline: “Facebook Employs Trust Ratings for Users But Will Not Tell You Your Score — The social network is predicting your trustworthiness in a bid to fight fake news. Users receive a score on a scale from zero to one that determines if they have a good or bad reputation… Your Facebook usage is being monitored, and may be converted in a trustworthiness score. 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 behavior 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 [at Facebook] is how people interact with articles.'” Oh ho! So you’re on Facebook and you’re reading articles, and what you do afterwards is what Facebook is monitoring. Do you enthusiastically recommend that article? Do you ignore that article?
Do you share it with others? Do you print it? Do you amplify it? Facebook knows. If Facebook thinks the article is fake news, then you get a negative score, and you are considered to be untrustworthy with fake news. Facebook is engaging in the identical behavior that the ChiCom government is engaging in, and both of them are leftist organizations. The ChiComs, of course, epitomize modern-day communism — and Facebook seeks to epitomize modern-day communism.
At Facebook, everyone and everything will be judged and categorized and politics will be a factor. This is how collectivists think and operate. This is why they are dangerous when they’re in power. Now, remember when Obamacare was being debated? I remember making a prediction. I issued a warning to people. I said, “I want you to stop and think about this: The way this is shaping up and the hoops that you have to go through to get insurance and how much you have to pay for it, and then when you have to get treated.”
Remember they’re gonna have death panels and all this. They’re have limited resources. You’re standing in line somewhere at the hospital or the emergency room. All of a sudden whether or not you’re Republican or Democrat might matter. People said, “Come on, Rush! You unnecessarily get people frightened and worked up over something that would never happen.” Never happen, huh? Well, it’s happening right now apparently with the ChiComs, and Facebook’s not far behind.
They are studying how you interact with news — and if they think that you believe fake news and that you spread it, you amplify it, you share it, then you are not considered trustworthy, and your ability to use Facebook and interact will thus be limited. Politics will be a factor, Facebook openly admits, in their determination of your trustworthiness. Now, does anybody…? When you hear this, is anybody alarmed at the similarities in policy, behavior, attitude, all of it, between the ChiCom government and Facebook?