Twitter has always been a marketing platform for large brands.
The number of meaningful tweets I see these days is just drowned out by people discussing global brands or whatever manufactured controversy is running around this week (that stupid Pepsi commercial for example).
Also, the news media is lazy and doesn't research stories anymore; they just look at trending topics on Twitter (which is honestly a really, really bad barometer for any sort of public sentiment given how much of Twitter is controlled by bots).
But yeah, I agree with you. Unless you're paying to get tweets removed, you're the product.
I'm skeptical, as I feel it's too normalised and the of majority people/customers are willing to live with this. On top of that "Customers" who are paying nothing to use these services (Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc.), are the products
To be more clear, Twitter's customers are corporations and special interest's groups, not regular non-paying end-users.