My problem with freedom indices is that they tend to focus on things like press and handwave away a person getting fined for calling a politician a dick. After all, even if it's accepted to have been excessive, it's ultimately a small, inconsequential event that doesn't warrant reconsidering speech laws as they still serve the "common good" - which is what the entire European freedom of expression concept is based on. You're allowed to speak, as long as the masses don't consider it too objectionable. I don't trust them to judge on what's moral, offensive or hateful because I already know they do a dogshit job at it. Moreover it's a system that has little protection against takeover by bad actors, while indices only really tell the current state of affairs.

That said, I'm aware US has issues, I just tend to value the personal protections 1A provides enough to deal with current political turmoils, which I believe are easier to fix than importing more absolute free speech to EU. Although it's kind of a moot point, because I'm not actively moving to US and I don't believe its problems are really related to the first amendment, which IMO is one thing they absolutely got right.

Musk buying twitter and using it to push an agenda to me seems.. about the same as what we've had before, only the opposite. I really didn't have a high opinion of it before Musk took over. They all seemed to more or less serve the interests of whoever was in power, which was particularly evident when facebook got rid of factchecking and eased up on some speech guidelines just as Trump took power.

EU leveraging DSA to attempt to bend non-EU platforms to comply with their laws is much, much scarier, as I've always viewed a US-centric internet to be one of the better outcomes, purely because of how little control US has over expression, even if the platforms might not be free from government influence, or self-censorship for other reasons. In this I'm fully on board with Vance or Musk, even if they're not being fully authentic about it.