How to protect against future cancellation and social credit systems?

If it happens, it will be enforced by private institutions, not public ones. Like your credit score. Your bank and your insurance company and businesses offering services and your employer will know what you’re saying and doing and they’ll offer special status to those who they deem low risk, and then everyone who doesn’t qualify will just not be eligible for services or will have to pay a much higher price. It’s a plausible but not inevitable future. But here in the west where everything is getting privatized anyway, it won’t be the government, it will be the quasi government of the insurance and financial sector and maybe also your employer that does it.

I think you're doing everything right. I assume that moving to confidentiality-friendly platforms to chat about sensitive topics also implies moving away from wide-area social media in general, and deleting your accounts — if not, that's a step you should take too.

When you get off a platform to which you've contributed anything with personal opinions in it, you should obfuscate whatever you've written there before deleting it. Meaning, fill the text box with garbage, then delete it, then delete your account. There used to be a plugin that let you do this automatically on Reddit, I don't know if there still is, but it wouldn't be too hard to script either.

Hypocritically on my part, HN does not support editing or deleting your old content. It's hard to avoid leaving any trace of yourself online; people want to talk to each other. I try to get around this by rotating user accounts, but I'm sure it's not enough.

Really, none of it is really going to be enough when it actually happens, and we should just be ready for that.

The only thing I can think of that would prevent a social credit system from being instituted is if people in power decided it was in their own best interest not to allow such a system. I suppose the ways to do that would either be to pay them more than other lobbyists, or to make it in their own best interest, i.e. let them know the danger it poses to us is also a danger to them. Given that, I wonder if, paradoxically, the whole cancel culture business is acting as a prophylactic against a social credit system, in that it makes legislators feel less invulnerable.

These are the golden days, so relish them. The measures you take of not being so casual with what you share are basic information hygiene that everyone should be doing already. There’s already ‘social cooling’ happening, but hard to say if a China style credit system would hit the West soon. But if it does, there are plenty of tools to go dark and circumvent that. Check out Privacy Guides and pick a few tools you can use.

For the record the fear is overblown, but to indulge you, you're using the least safe site you could possibly be using. Twitter, Reddit, Facebook will let you delete your old content. HN doesn't unless you make a request and get a human involved. The feature may as well not exist if it isn't self serve.

Limiting the scope of your personal opinions might actually make you more of a red flag. Having no social media these days is considered a big fat one among the zoomer generation.

For those who have not heard this term before, here is the Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System

TL;DR A FICO score for trustability