In what may be a really bad idea, a news article in the Guardian details that the United States is starting a new trend of asking for social media identities prior to granting VISAs. As a US Citizen you may not think much of this right now but if you consider where this might lead then you may become concerned. We already know people get fired for what they post on social media. We also know people on Steem can get downvoted into oblivion if they insult or hurt the minds of certain whales. We know in China the citizens with bad social credit are being punished. Is this a sign that the United States is going with a similar model?
What is your social media credit score?
So while it's not the exact same kind of social credit we see in China it may in fact evolve into something much worse. The private sector doesn't have the same kind of restrictions and regulations that the government would have when dealing with our data. We already know Facebook and other companies have enough data to know us better than we know ourselves. We also know this data can be analyzed by artificial intelligence now and going into the future as the AI capabilities get better. We have no idea what score our social media posts will produce and how it will rank us in the databases that various government agencies may be keeping.
Now extrapolate this globally where every government is working with these data sets or can access these databases? Considering governments do share information it can become another problem.
Why is it a problem if government scores our social media activity?
Some might wonder why it is a problem if our Twitter, Facebook and other accounts are studied to determine if we are friendly to the United States or other countries? Couldn't it be used to stop or keep out terrorists and hardcore criminals? In theory this sort of idea might keep some terrorists and criminals out but the bigger problem is that there is no guarantee it will only ever be used on criminals and terrorists. Also with regard to criminals we cannot predict in the future what will or will not be a crime with great enough accuracy to guarantee we will not someday be seen by some government somewhere in the world as a "criminal".
The more important thing this will do is it will create an atmosphere where potentially everyone will be afraid to speak out about any government activities anywhere in the world. You disagree with Chinese social credit? Well if you want to someday have a VISA from China you better be careful what you say on social media. You don't agree with some politician in Europe somewhere? You better be careful because you never know how powerful that politician could be or may become and what impact it could have on your ability to get a VISA someday. In other words, if you are critical of government policies that you disagree with you have no way to know for sure if that could someday restrict your ability to get a VISA.
I think this policy of checking social media accounts in this way is not a good idea. My reasoning being (the biggest reason) is that people say a lot of stupid stuff on social media without thinking or that they do not really mean. People may be drunk or tired one day and say some really stupid stuff in posts. These posts could then be saved forever and used to keep that person from getting a VISA. In fact, because of how social media is set up, it is possible for others to deliberately try to bait people into saying controversial stuff with the specific intent of getting their social media scores lower or to get them a bad perception by a foreign government. The majority of these people probably will not be terrorists but we do not yet know how much weight social media scores will have on the decision process of whether to grant a VISA. For example if someone says something on Steemit which could be perceived as racist will this damage their social media score and have a huge impact on their ability to be granted a VISA?