If you're interested on a video about how the social credit thing actually works, explained by a Chinese, you can watch this one, it's clear and concise enough.

I think with the being afraid to speak out thing I was more talking about the media walking on eggshells as just an unwritten rule

Hmmm, I think there's a part of truth to this. There is a more active state censorship in China than there is in, say, Europe, though I don't think it takes a punitive form except in extreme cases. In Europe it's private sector censorship: a journalist cannot write explicitly socialist opinions in a newspaper at risk of being fired, and the few journals that allow for this are fringe, heavily criticized, and don't receive any funding (most media here are unprofitable by themselves and survive by cash infusions from other parts of the private sector with vested interests in controlling the public narrative). On the other hand, the censorship in China makes it so that there aren't big crowds of far-right reactionary conspiracy theorists: imagine how many thousands and thousands of lives saved by the lack of vaccine denialists, facemask deniers, or fake natural cancer therapies.

I mean, the US is worse for a fact right now with Trump, we still have a measure of social welfare, but it's only been disintegrating and never so much as recovering a bit in the entirety of my adult life, and this applies to all of Europe. In Spain, a leftist party called Podemos recently became hugely popular trying to change this, and got an orchestrated smear campaign consisting of manufactured false evidence of funding by Iran and Venezuela which was fabricated by a reactionary corps within the national police under direction of the minister of interior affairs, and leaked to all capitalist media (we have two big media groups in Spanish Television, and one of them belongs to far-right Italian politician and pedophile Silvio Berlusconi, rest in piss fucker). This all but destroyed the party in a matter of a few years.

Something similar happened in Greece, they elected a leftist party called Syriza to government and they won the elections under the premise of reverting neoliberal policy. The EU intervened through the infamous "Troika" and told Greece that if it stopped cutting the budgets of healthcare and education it would be kicked out of the EU and the Euro. It's truly sad and disgusting.