China’s emerging social credit system (SCS): rarely has a topic been more hotly discussed, and more poorly understood. When most people think about the SCS, they imagine it primarily as a scoring mechanism, a way for the central government to rank China’s citizens and companies based on their behavior. But that’s a skewed misconception of what social credit actually is. The social credit system, at its core, is perhaps better described as a data-sharing service; the more technical among you could reasonably think of it as a massive national API.