The open-source world draws a line that most debates about online speech blur: "free as in speech" versus "free as in beer." The first is libre — freedom, the right to use, modify, and redistribute without permission. The second is gratis — zero price at the point of use. They are not the same thing, and conflating them is where the trouble starts. A platform can cost you nothing to join while exercising total control over what you may say; the beer is free, the speech is not. Applied to social networks, the distinction exposes the machinery underneath. Ad-supported platforms are gratis by design: the user pays no fee because the user is the inventory. That funding model is not neutral. When attention is the product sold to advertisers, the incentive is to amplify whatever holds attention and to suppress whatever frightens the brands paying the bills. Speech that thrives is speech that monetizes, and speech that gets quietly throttled is speech that doesn't — which means the boundaries of "free expression" are drawn by an ad budget, not a constitution. Deplatforming and content moderation become economic acts dressed in moral language.