These moral/technical equivalency memes I don't think hold water.
Nobody in the US is going to censor your email so that if you say something about Trump it gets magically deleted.
Court cases and mugshots are public information and a matter of transparency. When you murder someone, well, that's part of the deal. That's very different from the government measuring other, minute aspects of your life and making it public to everyone.
If your social media posts are marked private - which is your choice - then for the most part they're not going to be available to arbitrary 3rd parties, moreover, there are definitely social media solutions you can use that don't share anything.
There is an ongoing war over your information mostly for advertising by the way (not hiring) and hopefully some legislation will take care of that, and some dialogue over NSA/Snowden type things. Thankfully, there are actually laws, warrants, judges in the mix.
Surely we have to judge China's actions from a completely different angle, as they have their own history, social system etc. - but the equivalency arguments just don't work.
I think if you tried to text someone a message about Obama, and it was magically deleted by the US government, it would send shivers down your spine, and however political or not you were, you'd be signed up for the first protest/action - as would most of us.
We all have some concerns about our system but it's manageable - what's happening in China is right out of a novel.
Also note that 'it's just begun'. This is possibly only the first tranche.
The de-facto objective may be to leverage tech to it's max - the result is effective total control over everyone's lives.