Local governments are also asking social media companies to help orchestrate public shaming initiatives. In the southern city of Nanning, the social media app TikTok partnered with the local court to broadcast photos of blacklisted people between videos, like a digital mugshot. In the northern city of Shijiazhuang, blacklisted people and entities are displayed on a map within the messaging app WeChat.
I don't see what we're getting so wrong. "Disproportionate, arbitrary, and wide-ranging" seems like a good way to describe it.

I mean, the entire rest of the article describes exactly what was gotten wrong. Don't like China fine, but the stories of the Social Credit system that have been published and spread around inaccurately describe China as the ultimate technological marvel of futuristic dystopias. Whereas, in reality, it's just your plain old typical dystopia, not all that far off from our own.

Sounds like the term Kafkaesque; plain ol' typical dystopia, done analog.

It's basically another layer of keeping tabs on people, not different from the tons of CCTV cameras we already have.

The west paints it as this "oh no big brother to the max" while being big brother to the max themselves.