A post on Facebook claims: “Ukraine just silently announced it's the first country to implement the WEF's 'Great Reset’ by setting up a Social Credit Application combining Universal Basic Income (UBI), a Digital Identity & a Vaccine Passport all within their Diia app”.
People in Ukraine have been able to use the Diia app for ID documents and vaccine passports, and those eligible can apply for a one-off payment if they lost their job due to the war via the app.
But this is unrelated to the World Economic Forum’s founder’s book ‘The Great Reset’, which outlines how governments can adapt post-pandemic. And these uses of the app can’t really be described as a social credit system.
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What is the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset?
The post mentions something called the “WEF’s Great Reset”. This refers to a book called “Covid-19: The Great Reset”, published in 2020 and co-authored by the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) founder and executive chairman Klaus Schwab.
Broadly, the book discusses how the world’s political, business and social institutions may wish to address pre-existing geo-political concerns, such as global warming, in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic.
‘The Great Reset’ has become the basis of numerous conspiracy theories since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. We have checked misinformation about this book before, including false claims it said people would die in planned epidemics and that Klaus Schwab had been arrested for crimes related to the pandemic.
What is the Diia app?
Diia is a Ukrainian phone app used by citizens to store official documents.
The post claims the app contains a “Social Credit Application combining Universal Basic Income (UBI), a Digital Identity & a Vaccine Passport”.
It’s unclear what the post means by Universal Basic Income, as the country has no such scheme, though some outside the country have suggested one should be started by foreign powers using frozen Russian assets.
It’s true that the country’s Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal announced a one-off payment for those who lost their jobs because of the war, and that those eligible could apply for this money through the app. (Some online claimed that only those who were vaccinated could get this payment, but this isn’t the case, and likely came from a mis-translation of the Prime Minister’s statement.)
It’s true that the app can also contain ID documents, including passports, which are legally equivalent to their paper counterparts there. There’s no evidence that having their ID on the app is mandatory for Ukrainians though.
It’s also true that the Diia app was how digital vaccine certificates were generated in Ukraine.
What is a social credit score?
It’s unclear what the post means by a ‘social credit application’ being contained in the app, though we have written about false claims of introductions of such schemes before.
There’s no evidence that any such system is planned in Ukraine.
Conspiracy theorists often discuss the introduction of a social credit system similar to the one in China, which works like a credit score, whereby actions of citizens, businesses and government entities are monitored and assessed.
In 2014, China began planning a social credit system to be implemented by 2020 (several reports state the 2020 deadline was missed). It has been reported that a good rating could see rewards like priority healthcare, but a bad rating could lead to sanctions such as restrictions on loans, travel and education.
The exact scoring system planned for use in China is not known, and there are no publicly available reports of how exactly it works.
Picture courtesy of Max Kukurudziak via Unsplash.