Google and TikTok may seem free, but every click and scroll you make gets packaged into a "user profile" and sold to advertisers. Take Facebook, for example—it makes about $50 per user per year just from their data. In the internet age, if you're not paying for the product, you are the product.
I don’t see how you as an individual could be made the product.
Even services like the ones you e mentioned are products that are bought and sold. Of course it’s never free, you pay for internet and you use the internet to access these services. They collect their tariff from the clicks and that’s payment. No one says it’s free but, it’s offered at a fair price that you don’t even notice. You just enjoy the services they provide and that’s it. For some monetized pages in some social medias, you get to pay to access certain features. It’s just a new world and how it works.
More precisely in the modern era like today, increasingly sophisticated technology to earn money will be easier if you use social media platforms, you don't need a lot of capital, you only need skills to create content and so on.
So actually nothing is free, we access tiktok, youtube, facebook and the like need internet and the internet must be paid for. Maybe what OP means by the technology that is developing now, we don't need a lot of capital to earn money, just by focusing on social media we can earn money. Almost everything in this world to earn money, nothing is free, at least without cost or capital we need to try, and that effort is indirectly also capital.