| In 2014 the Chinese government released a plan to create a nationwide scheme for tracking the trustworthiness of everyday citizens, corporations, and government officials. In the West, this so-called social credit system was greeted with widespread alarm. As Louise Matsakis writes this week on WIRED Backchannel and Security, critics said it had the potential to create "a dystopian nightmare straight out of Black Mirror. The articles and broadcast segments often said China's central government is using a futuristic algorithm to compile people's social media connections, buying histories, location data, and more into a single score dictating their rights and freedoms." But as the article—coproduced with Public Radio International's The World—explains, the system is not shaping up to be the scary panopticon its detractors feared. So far it's just a patchwork of regional experiments and pilot programs. And the attention it has received is overshadowing real and egregious surveillance practices and human rights abuses in China, like the use of facial-recognition algorithms to track millions of citizens, censorship of the internet, and the detention of Muslim Uyghers in Xinjiang province. But the exaggerated coverage of the social credit system has had one positive effect: Chinese academics are now studying its potential downsides. "This entire thing is just so massive, and it varies across place to place" says Xin Dai, a professor and associate dean at China's Ocean University Law School. "It is easy to sort of misinterpret or only catch part of it, without seeing the entire picture." Mark Robinson| Features Editor, WIRED | 
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