The difference to me is that in China, you can lose social credit by "spreading rumors online," and we all know what that's code for.

More generally, there's a big difference between "we won't let you do X because we don't trust you" versus "we won't let you do X because we have moral objections to something you've done." China's social credit system takes the latter into account.

Edit: Frankly, I'm getting pretty tired of this "the US is no better" discussion every time there's a news story about China's social credit system. The US has some major problems, but conflating the two is a false equivalence. When CNN reporters are banned from flying because the president thinks they're "fake news", we can have this discussion again.