And you don't even need to go that far. Off-topic posts could result in a swift 3-day ban. There were even words and phrases that could get you autobanned the second you hit submit.

“Illegal” where? There's a lot of different illegal stuff in a lot of different countries.

The elephant in the room is that USA appointed itself as a policeman for the whole network. Demands of its state and business entities are somehow tied to the fact that there is no true free speech on the open internet.

Illegal wherever, it doesn't matter. Very few admins are going to be willing to take a bullet for you even if they enjoy your spicy memes.

Well, but who shoots that bullet? It doesn't appear out of thin air. We shouldn't consider that it all happened “by itself”, it has formed quite recently, and the memory is fresh. In addition to that, we can see that quite specific topics attract attention of that internet cop, and he's pretty ignorant about the rest. It seems that the choice is somehow guided by the spectacle presented to public inside the US, and changes with political fashions.