>Before the masses were corralled into walled gardens.
I'm not sure how old you are, but when is this time you speak of? AOL had users in a walled garden for decades. Then those users moved to myspace, then facebook. You're going to need to be more specific about this magical time when the average user was somehow "free of walled gardens".
Compuserve and a number of other credible alternatives to AOL existed during that time. Usenet and BBSes also existed. Myspace and Facebook (initially) were only for teenagers, college students, and people who never grew out of those phases. You might as well put Livejournal in this list, because none of those platforms (at those times) were as effective at corralling and suppressing wrongthink as Twitter and Facebook have been today.
Apart from their obligations under the law, AOL did not police content. In one example, AOL banned explicit discussions of homosexual activity but did not ban anti-homosexual hate speech. They policed the first type of speech because the CDA required them to prevent the transmission of explicit material to minors, but they did not police the second type of speech because it was not illegal.
Facebook and Twitter are actively policing speech that is not illegal.
The drink coaster distributor was popular without a doubt. They never factored into my use of the Internet. Without fact-check, there's a mild equivalence at best. It is hard not to encounter platforms and their agendas in some form today.
The free hosting providers were not engaging in political censorship. Google had a maxim, "Don't be evil". They didn't have infoboxes explaining, "Experts agree that enhanced interrogation is not torture".
I'm not even sure how to respond other than to point out AOL is literally where the term walled garden in reference to the internet came from. They were WORSE than what is around today by an order of magnitude.
Early AOL didn't give you access to the broader internet, you got access to the content they allowed you access to. That was far, far worse than today when individual platforms choose not to host certain content whether by force or choice. Your ISP isn't curating a tiny subset of the internet for you.
I'm not sure how old you are, but when is this time you speak of? AOL had users in a walled garden for decades. Then those users moved to myspace, then facebook. You're going to need to be more specific about this magical time when the average user was somehow "free of walled gardens".