Game developer Brianna Wu, who is
running as a Democrat in Massachusetts’ 8th District against incumbent Steve Lynch, says China’s social-credit systems are a natural extension of how China has developed its Internet systems.
“From the beginning, [China] has censored [its] content online, and heavily regulated speech,” she says. Sometimes Chinese consumers
rebel against the regulations and what they perceive as their lack of privacy, but Wu, one of the major targets by the
Gamergate online-abuse campaign, says online interactions in China remain very different from those in the United States. “They’re not having extreme instability from speech online. We’re having a crisis with online bots, and online death threats.”
Wu, whose in-laws emigrated to the U.S. from China in the 1960s, notes that the ways in which China has developed its Internet use, and thus impacted its culture, has formed the underpinnings of its social-credit systems. Taken together, China’s 13
5-year-plans have allowed the country to control how it develops online.
“The U.S. doesn’t even have a one-year plan for the Internet,” she says. And the ramifications are serious: She believes that a social-credit system would have stopped Gamergate. “I feel they’re going to keep leapfrogging us because they have a long-term plan,” she says, “but I still would not get on board with it. It’s like putting Equifax in charge of how you get loans.”
