Will X enable a social credit system?

Twitter is being rebranded as X under a massive overhaul of the platform, which sounds like it will be a bit like China’s mega app WeChat. Does that mean it could be a platform for a social credit system?

Elon Musk is losing the bird icon, which has been associated with Twitter since it started in 2006, and he’s rebranding it as X. Just X. So we’re not sure yet whether you’ll still tweet from X or whether it’ll be called something else like Xing or - nah I got nothing. 

But the superficial imaging of the platform is just the very tip. There’s a lot more to this rebranding. 

Elon Musk is following through with his tweet from November 2022 to create an everything app. 

Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app

So he’s doing what he said. 

But what is an everything app? The worldwide standard for that is China’s WeChat.

Almost everyone in China who owns a smartphone has a WeChat account, which is part of China’s social credit system.

Most countries have a credit score. That’s not new or controversial. It’s entirely based on your financial history, and it’s used to predict whether or not you’re likely to pay your credit bills.

The Chinese model, however, goes to a whole nother level. 

Under this plan, all citizens are enrolled in a massive database with data about their financial history, online behaviours, everyday purchases, traffic violations, who they associate with, and much more. 

A low credit score could land someone on a blacklist deemed untrustworthy. That could mean they’re banned from catching planes or trains, their internet speed could be throttled, banned from attending good schools, staying in good hotels and just the general public shaming of being labelled bad citizens. 

Under a prototype of the credit score system, private companies were tasked with collecting information from their users, including the parent company of WeChat. 

WeChat has its own credit rating system, which could presumably be used to limit where someone can spend their money or if they can use their account at all. 

If you go to a big city like Shanghai, you need WeChat pay to use a vending machine or to catch a taxi.

Obviously, there are some pretty big red flags here. 

Remember when evil Twitter was permanently banning people for incorrect political speech? What if that app was the only one you could use to pay for things? I could go on for ages here. The point is, Elon says he wants Twitter to be like WeChat. 

In a question and answer session last June he said. "There’s no WeChat equivalent outside of China,” Musk said. "You basically live on WeChat in China. If we can recreate that with Twitter, we’ll be a great success.