system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: What is Chinese Social Credit, and how does it affect the lives of the citizens?

I was curious because I was certain it was a hoax, but I wanted to be sure.
gpt
The end goal is meant to be a national system that enables a person or company to have a particular score that determines their 'trustworthiness' based on moral and or legal actions. In its current state, the system differs in implementation province to province and there's no set standard for what it should look like, what matters in terms of score and what the particular punishments are. The aim is to have a national system and set of standards that are equal across the country at some point but its moving along very slowly. 

The closest relative is the US credit score system, which rates people based on able they are to pay off debts, rewarding people by lower interest/cost loans and punishing through higher interest/cost loans and some businesses will deny the ability to rent housing from them, affect employment, etc, etc. 

Social credit is like an expansion of that, which punishes individuals for not following laws like jaywalking or not paying taxes on time (subject to the area) or rewarding through particular actions like wearing a mask or signing into places for contact tracing (again, subject to the area). The other addition is the expansion to businesses, which rates businesses based on their practices, and punishes them for not paying employees on time and rewards them for following codes and things like environmental legislation. And in turn has the capacity to reward/punish based on score.

Reporting is often overly vague and excessively broad. There's concerns about overreach and extralegal punishment, but particular actions that affect score and punishments/rewards that get reported on may or may not even exist. In some instances there are plans or an example given for a particular thing but is not actually implemented anywhere. Or particular actions that can affect score are given as a proposal but not integrated.