"Freedom of speech" means you are allowed to express your opinion without fear of being censored or persecuted for it.

It is not the same kind of "free" as in "no cost". Twitter is a paid service. To access Twitter, you have to pay for it. Either by purchasing a subscription or viewing ads.

Think of it as having to buy a newspaper before being able to read it. That doesn't stop the paper's editors from being able to criticize the government.

Then they should be glad Nitter instances are offloading some of their traffic, right? Some requests are cache hits, so I handled that whole request myself and spared an Elon server from handling it.