Is China's discussed great social media credit system feasible?

In the latest round of his suggested readings, Massimo Pigliucci mentions it in passing, mainly from the point of view of a Stephen Kershnar, philosophy prof at SUNY, who among other things, utters this:

The problem with Shen’s argument is that people do not have a right to dignity, privacy, or reputation.

Just. Wow.

"Saphsin" in comments, with multiple links, responds vociferously that it taint so. And I, in my last comment on Sunday, countered with this ProPublica piece about China's degree of social media and general Internet control over early days and weeks of coronavirus news.

First, per my comment with that link, I do NOT think there's a huge degree of scalability on the tech side. Also, unlike the US, where an Amazon, if it ever actually developed a corporate conscience, could walk away from CIA work, many of the Chinese tech companies involved with furthering Xi Jinping Thought through censorship of questioning of it, if not state-owned, do so much business with the Chinese government that they can't walk away.

Per Lee Majors speaking the opening to "The Six Million Dollar Man," Xi could easily say: "We have the technology. We have the capability ... "

To the degree there IS anything like a scalability issue? It's on the people side.

Sure, it would take at least an extra 100,000 people to make this truly work. And unlike Hucksterman outsourcing Facebook content moderation to the Philippines, this would have to be done in-house, so to speak.

But, impossible? Μὴ γένοιτο, to riff on Paul; there, it means "god forbid," translated idiomatically, or something similar. Would that there were a god to forbid on something like this! In reality? I look at pre-1989 East Germany. The Stasi reportedly had as many as 200,000 informants on its books in a country 2 percent the size of China.

The REAL issue? It's a philosophical one. A Platonic one. Per "The Republic," who watches the watchers? Who guards the guardians? Actually, per a program this big, in a country the size of China, per theory of other minds, you'd certainly need a third level, that of people watching the people watching the watchers. Per Monty Python, the people watching the watchers who watch the watching the watchers have been sacked from the subtitles.

But, with carrots and sticks, or bread and crucifixions, to spin Caesar a bit, you can get enough spying on the spies to make this happen.

Facebook and Twitter themselves offer ideas. Both allow people to report things like fake news, misleading claims about elections, etc. (Though Twitter, at least in the case of one certain elected official, doesn't actually do anything with that, of course. Not really.)

Let's say that Chinese social media platform Weibo, roughly similar to Twitter, had similar reporting tools. Let's also say that, for each comment by someone else I report and that Weibo agrees needed to be reported auto-tweaks my algorithm to make future comments by me more visible to others. Let us also say that, short of account suspension, the more posts of yours that are reported and that Weibo agrees needed reporting auto-tweaks your algorithm in the reverse direction. (Surprised that Twitter hasn't already thought of this; the cesspool would clean up a fair amount right there.) Let us now say that CCP officials oversee Weibo's reporting system and that, in addition to Facebook and Twitter reporting categories, there is one that is called "Insults Xi Jinping Thought" or similar, and that CCP officials monitor this category of reports most closely.

ProPublica tells us more about how China's paid Internet trolls stage-manaaged making the coronavirus appear less bad in China than it actually was. This, too, should show us how a social media credit system could be controlled. You use fluffers to fluff the subservient.

Sorry, Saph, but your links aside? This shows how that wouldn't be that hard. It's just a subtler, more insidious form of the Cultural Revolution.

Xi could even say, per Mao: "Let a thousand Weibo accounts be shut down!"

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More Chinese coronavirus lies, including those by Winnie the Pooh himself, President Xi Jinping, have been exposed. These are again about covering up/ignoring the early days and weeks in Wuhan, including Xi's own lies about how quickly he intervened.