I think that you overextimate the american exceptionalism. In the xx century the europe was destroyed in the ww leaving the usa as the only state not touched by the wars. The rest of the world was lagging techlogicaly. Now the situation is different. Usa is a young country and it is not different from any other.
It is, sadly, like to say in the 1800: if your newspaper cooperates with government it is not closed, otherwise we can close it at will. A lot of established freedom of press laws now will never had passed.
Why the state seize mastodon/exit nodes/megaupload/private servers and NEVER amazon/apple/facebook/twitter/google servers? The law is different if you are a zuckemberg?
To be an empire doesn’t mean be different