Welcome to our blog for COMP6217 Science of Online Social Networks!

We are Darron Tang, Sue Breeze, Travis Ralph-Donaldson and Luis Cayola Pérez, and together we conform “The Britizens”!

Our project is Britizen, a social network designed to give every UK national a citizen score which reflects how trustworthy of  a citizen they are. It is an exploration into how social networks can be used for propaganda with inspiration from the existing Chinese system Sesame Credit. Sesame Credit is a credit score owned by Alibaba which looks at various aspects of an individual including purchase history, friend network, credit card and bill payment history and household status. Sesame Credit is designed to encourage consumerism in China by providing a social credit score to improve transparency and trust which hopefully improves lending in China. Britizen will focus on what such a system where gamification and network effects affect one’s citizen score would look like in the United Kingdom. Britizen will provide incentives to users to obtain higher scores whilst dictating what affects scores and suggesting to the user ways in which one can raise their score.