Social Credit System

The Chinese system for ranking people's reputation based on their social behavior and allegiance to the government. The Social Credit System is enabled by the massive surveillance in place via the Internet and an estimated 200 million cameras in Chinese cities.

Launched in 2009, this social ranking is like a credit score for behavior, and it becomes extremely important to citizens who want to advance in their profession and community. Even the most minor infractions such as playing loud music, jaywalking or not showing up after making a reservation contribute to lowering the score. See social media.

social media

The forms of electronic communication that individuals and companies use to share information with friends, colleagues and customers. A primary feature of social media such as Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook is that people actively follow someone who posts content, and they are able to respond. For example, users can resend (retweet) messages on Twitter and reply to posts on Facebook. See retweet.

Ordinary blogs may allow feedback, and some websites do as well, but social media is all about spreading information to participating users. Contrast with "industrial media," which refer to professionally produced radio, TV and film.

The terms "social media," "social network," "social networking," "social platform," "social neworking site" and "social networking service" are synonymous.

The Downside
The danger with social media is that erroneous news travels as fast as or faster than genuine news. In Clint Watts' insightful book "Messing with the Enemy: Surviving in a social media world of hackers, terrorists, Russians and fake news" he explains why social media becomes "antisocial media" (see fake news, disinformation and deepfake).

Worse yet, the social media platforms reinforce members' views of the world by feeding them similar information in the form of news and ads. Algorithms determine a person's social, religious and political opinions and feed them information that aligns with those views rather than giving them anything diverse or contradictory. These platforms have become extensions to radio, TV and Internet news, which over the past several decades have become opinion platforms that favor one side over the other. There is little balance in today's news from any single source except perhaps from "The Week," a print and online magazine noted for representing both sides in its articles. See influencer, viral content, new media, social networking service, blog, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, podcast and user-generated content.

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social system

any, especially a relatively persistent, ‘patterning of social relations across “time-space", understood as reproduced practices’ (GIDDENS, 1984). Thus in this general sense, a SOCIETY, or any ORGANIZATION or GROUP constitutes a social system. For Giddens, however, social systems are highly variable in the degree to which they manifest a 'systematic pattern’. They ‘rarely have the sort of internal unity’ true of biological systems, or of the kind usually assumed by FUNCTIONALISM (see also SYSTEM, SYSTEMS THEORY). Compare also SOCIAL STRUCTURE, STRUCTURE.
(more specifically, as in FUNCTIONALISM) any persistent system of interaction between two or more social actors up to and including a unitary SOCIETY, especially where this is associated with a tendency of the system to boundary maintenance, i.e. to preserve its position vis-a-vis its external environment, whether this be other social systems or the physical world. In PARSONS’ thinking (1951), and in most modern forms of functionalist and STRUCTURAL-FUNCTIONALIST sociology, such a conception of social system has been particularly associated with conceptions of FUNCTIONAL PREREQUISITES of societies and of societies as self-maintaining systems, etc. (see also SYSTEMS THEORY, SUBSYSTEMS MODEL).

Collins Dictionary of Sociology, 3rd ed. © HarperCollins Publishers 2000

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References in periodicals archive

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Once again, no other social system on earth does this.

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Let us now show that reflexive decision-making is endogenous to the social system of expectations (Dubois, 1998b).

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