Not OP, but this is definitely not how OP meant the word "free". In the context of Twitter, think about free analogy being newsgroups (if you are young enough

Not OP, but this is definitely not how OP meant the word "free". In the context of Twitter, think about free analogy being newsgroups (if you are young enough not to have witnessed it, in the early days of Internet, your ISP would provide you with email box with some space attached to it and a newsgroup access). Newsgroups were functionally very similar to what Twitter does, i.e. they were designed to share news between multiple subscribers of those news. So, newsgroups weren't free in the sense that you had to pay your ISP to access them (not necessarily billed separately though, typically just a part of a package deal). But they were free in the sense that it was a distributed service provided by multiple (and by that I mean, hundreds) of independent providers, and it was an open standard: if you wanted to become a provider of the service, you wouldn't have to invest a lot into that, just set up yet another server with some freely available software and you are good to go. So, if for some reason your ISP wouldn't connect you to the newsgroups, you'd just go to another one who would (it didn't really matter back in the days and the feature didn't have as wide of an outreach as social networks have today, but, in principle, it would've worked that way). So, this kind of freedom would've offered better protections against single company deciding the fate of the important part of yours.