Probably because it's the country most prominently on display in the media. Foreign news are normally about the US (99% bad news, 1% inconsequential news more often than not...nobody cares to cover acts of kindness, etc), music, tv shows, movies, most of them come from the US, and mostly everywhere you go on the internet (not exactly known to be full of intelligent and articulated people) is full of Americans. Adding to all of that, some subsets of American culture seem to create some of the most annoying individuals in the world. So it's just all too easy to generalise and think that those people represent all Americans (yes, it's wrong to do so).
Speaking stricly online, for every nice American I meet, I meet 3 or 4 assholes, which is not so different from the percentage I get from other countries; I just meet a lot more Americans than any other nationality. Also, to distort the situation even more, it's easy to (wrongly) assume most people you talk to online are American because a lot of people adopt US writing habits, so some of those assholes might not even be American =P
Adding to that, Americans are so used to being treated as the scum of the Earth by other countries that most of them seemed to have developed a knee-jerk reaction to anything remotely offensive, coming through as assholes even if they aren't. It's a lose-lose situation.
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