Yes you definitely have a point there. Your censorship is done centrally and explicitly by the government. Ours is done by the ever changing unwritten rules of sanctimonious mobs performing their offense rituals and the corporate advertisers who fear them. Which is worse is up for debate I guess.
I'll let that speak for itself on "which is worse". I find these cases where modern, educated westerners are afraid to draw the obvious, self evident conclusion sad. You know which is worse, but you actually think someone else who disagrees is worthy of respect. They aren't. They are brainwashed.
Until people wake up from this silly idea that there are infinite interpretations of reality that are all equal, this weak kind of statements will continue.
Roseanne Barr didn't get arrested, imprisoned, or executed. The CCP fears and hates it's own people. I walked through an Ai Wei Wei exhibit 2 years ago. I was awestruck and moved to silence by his amazing work. Along with the aforementioned Nobel Laureate, these are individuals that are gifts to the human race. But their mere opinions threaten the CCP, and the last I heard, Weiwei had his studio burned and had been intermittently imprisoned. An amazing, once in a generation artist..... And you have the audacity to act as if there is an equivalency here.
Angry mobs can execute people too, and did so frequently in the US not so long ago. To a black man in the 1920's non governmental censorship was a deadly threat. Freedom of speech is not an interpretation of reality. It can't be proven or falsified. It is a religious belief, and not all societies share it.
I do personally think that their system is worse in terms of magnitude of consequences, and that ours is worse in that its rules are completely arbitrary and unwritten.