Should this thread be moved to OT?
- Yes
- No
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Vote quickly, poll closes Friday night, majority rule 
I needed that laugh, but bourbon through the nose burns … wish it had been scotch.
I agree, but only to a point:
You are correct that recent posts here belong in my off-topic thread which obviously covers such stuff.
But this entire thread does not belong in off topic. The earlier posts are on topic right here in Finance. And if posters had continued to post on the title topic all would have been fine.
These are my threads, however I do not have the power to put this right. And the low level of moderation here offers no help.
For the record:
I continue to believe one’s political views should NOT be used as an excuse to harm a person’s finances. That is Communist Chinese thinking. I hope it does not come to America. Such a thing as “social credit” should be an alien concept here . . . . but especially when a citizen’s score is used to harm a person financially, or interfere with a person’s financial opportunities.
How would it be if you walked into a bank in your new city, sought to open an account, and after the teller checked her computer you were told:
You’re a Democrat. We do not want your business, or your money, in this bank. Get out!
Or if you wanted to open a new business in that same new city, you go to City Hall to apply for the proper permits and licenses, and the clerk after checking her computer says:
You’re a Republican. We do not allow Republicans to open new businesses in our city. Get out of City Hall. And we hope you also leave our city, as well.
Obviously these example sound VERY far fetched today. But consider:
Back in 2014 NY Governor Andrew Cuomo openly announced that Conservatives were not welcome in NY State and should leave the state. Doubt me? Not for long:
Cuomo: Conservatives have a social credit deficit and should leave
While this thread is strictly forward looking, a glance in the rear view mirror now and again can be instructive. And please, as a favor to me, do not now turn this thread into a dissertation on Andrew Cuomo. I only brought up that incident to illustrate what could happen. Obviously if Cuomo had had the power to uproot and expel any group of citizens, because of their political beliefs, that would have had massive economic impact on those people.
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Aren’t statements like “We don’t do business with Democrats/Republicans.” legal?
I mean, if political affiliation is not defined by Congress as a protected class (from definition of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964), then isn’t it legal to discriminate against people based on political affiliation?
I think ultimately this is not something that needs to be protected by law for the private sector. If businesses openly discriminated, wouldn’t you expect some new ones to appear to fill the void? We’ve seen examples of this happening when various politicians got banned for extended periods from some platforms. They just found other ways to reach their audience. In other words, the market adjusted like it does for any other business opportunities.
Now for the public sector, maybe First Amendment considerations already come into play so that discrimination based on political beliefs cannot happen openly. There is a reason Cuomo or others did not successfully implement discrimination no matter how much they would have wanted to. It’d be a little too convenient as well for locking up district for one party or the other. Who’d need gerrymandering if they could simply uproot just enough opponent to secure political wins forever.
Pragmatically though, most of the risks are avoided by simply declaring yourself independent. For the same type of reason that Descartes concluded that believing in God was more advantageous than not believing. 
From the OP, as a reminder of the real topic here:
I was attempting to offer a specific example of a generalized notion, that of social credit. One’s social credit score might well relate to one’s politics, as well as to any number of other things; whether or not you signed up for the “voluntary” city park cleanup crew, for example. Please be aware this thread is forward looking and relates to the ability of society as a whole to mess with one’s individual financial prospects depending on a social credit score. Such a score does not exist today per se, but we can start to feel nascent rumblings.
Well, of course. But, again, your thinking is of today and mine is of the future and the direction things might be headed.
Before this thread was driven off topic by strictly political posts, to which I did not contribute at all (not here, anyway), it served I hope at least for some readers to raise awareness of where we could be headed with social credit scores and how that could impact a person’s personal finances in a significant way. I hope this does not happen and I do not want it to happen. But ten or twenty years hence who knows where we might be.
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I just realized that PayPal / Venmo is the only financial institution on the list and the only one that requires your real name. Facebook has a real name policy, but I’m pretty sure they don’t actually verify it, and the policy is very controversial. The rest don’t care – the internet really likes anonymity and it’s going to stay that way. You’re not going to get blocked from the other systems if they don’t know who you are. The opinion piece in OP = much ado about nothing.
The opinion that such a social credit system is coming is a political opinion, not financial. Even if such a system could impact personal finance, the discussion is about the politics, not finance. That’s why I think the thread belongs in OT.
I thought it was inherently and outrageously intolerant to expect anyone to pretend to be someone they’re not? If it’s so terrible to make someone with a penis be called a male, surely it’s just as terrible to force someone to remain anonymous and use a name other than what they choose to be called.
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Won’t someone think of their pronouns! The violence done by all those online people, even accidentally addressing an anonymous person incorrectly surely justifies a Real Name policy.
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Facebook is one of the largest peer-to-peer sales platforms in the world, might be 2nd to only ebay now.
Twitter is the largest cultural opinion engagement platform - lots of people make their living sharing opinions.
Gmail is the largest email platform - it would be disingenuous to suggest that email is not linked to finance.
Uber - meh
Amazon - besides the number of mom & pop sellers on the actual amazon platform, they are the largest webhosting company in the world, so clearly finance related.
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How is email linked to finance? And more specifically, how is gmail linked to finance? GooglePay maybe, not gmail.
And you can host your own email if you have to, almost anywhere in the world.
By that stretch EVERYTHING is finance related 
You don’t think tens of thousands of people use Gmail to communicate financial transactions each day?
You can start your own bank too. Using your logic, that means that being barred from transacting with bank of America won’t affect you financially.
If you’re in e-commerce and you’re barred from transacting on the largest web hosting platform in the world, it’s not a stretch to call that finance related. What happens when they start banning USERS from going on aws hosted sites?
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You can do just about anything, if you have the funds, skills, and inclination. I dare say that most people wouldnt have a clue how to start creating and hosting their own email, let alone be able to maintain it reliably.
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Educate me. How do you “communicate financial transactions” by email? I’m honestly at a loss. I get plenty of “notification” emails from my financial institutions. Those emails do not by themselves constitute transactions, only transaction notifications. Other than that I do not “communicate financial transactions” by email. How would I go about doing that? And more importantly why would I do that? Email is insecure by design, I wouldn’t want my private financial information revealed in an email.
And as I mentioned, email is email, it doesn’t have to be gmail. And it doesn’t require your real name to be tied to the email account. Outside of work, most people do not use their real names as part of their personal email address.
I dare say that most people would not be affected if the worst of the ideas in the OP come to pass in the dystopian future.
Yet, it is likely they’d be lied to by cops?
Amazon plans to kick more people off their web services based on whatever Amazon Trust & Safety doesn’t like. We already know their priorities - avoiding bad PR and suppressing conservative viewpoints.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-amazon-proactively-remove-more-co
Amazon made headlines in the Washington Post last week for shutting down a website hosted on AWS that featured propaganda from Islamic State that celebrated the suicide bombing that killed an estimated 170 Afghans and 13 U.S. troops in Kabul last Thursday. They did so after the news organization contacted Amazon, according to the Post.
The proactive approach to content comes after Amazon kicked social media app Parler off its cloud service shortly after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot for permitting content promoting violence.
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Every month, I have numerous bank accounts I cannot log into without receiving an emailed verification code. Thus if I’ve lost access to my email, I am unable to get into my bank accounts.
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Where politics and personal finance intersect, assignment of a topic becomes difficult and problematic. There are numerous such intersections. My hope was to limit discussion here to social credit since impact of that concept is already being felt in communist China. This offers precedent.
But I am persuaded by your assertion that the notion a social credit system IS coming is, indeed, political. It was never my intent to promulgate that assertion. I do, however, have the concern a social credit system MIGHT BE coming. And should that happen here in the USA then certainly there likely would be big time impact on the personal finances of some individuals, a major financial concern for those people.
But getting back to categorization, I was disappointed when some posters here went (in my opinion) completely off the topic of social credit and posted strictly political stuff. I would have removed those posts had I the power. I do not. The most recent posts are better and more on topic, and they are appreciated.
I’m still the OP here. Movement of this topic over to off topic will allow me to open things up and invite in the sorts of purely political posts, including my own, which do not belong here in the finance category. I’m uncertain how useful that will be since we already have a politics thread over there. Maybe we need a politics/personal finance thread as well. I dunno. Certainly we need to explore that intersection somewhere.
Anyway, to tack a bit closer back to (what remains) the topic here in finance, I found this Australian story reporting from Communist China of what happens when you run afoul of the social credit system there:
China erases billionaire actress Zhao Wei from history
I’ll close with this short post dated yesterday, shamelessly stolen from Ken’s website, and written there by QED:
It is a sadness that certain individuals are in denial regarding the impact of politics on personal financial well being. Even worse, too many of those in denial seek actively to suppress discussion of such impact. Freedom, liberty, and personal financial well being flourish in sunlight, but they shrivel and perish in darkness.
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Apple feeling some heat on the privacy front for scanning everyone’s photos. Rollout delayed.
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You’re not gonna lose access to your email if it is not tied to your exact identity by the email service provider (a name alone is not sufficient to identify an individual and lead the service provider to take any negative action). Email service at its core is completely anonymous.
Fox News was the only source that treated this subjectively. All the left-wing media sites treated it like it was her fault but she was denied service. They Left would probably also approve if she was denied service because of her skin color.
Owens was sent a letter by Aspen Laboratories’ co-founder Suzanna Lee informing her that her “booking” was being cancelled and that she would be “denied service” because of both her aversion to governmental face mask mandates and her analysis of the effectiveness of vaccination shots.
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