Is twitter any less evil at creaming your profile and selling your soul and any less advert heavy then Facebook which seems now to fit in stuff about my friends between adverts
Yes, because twitter has an API that can be accessed without adverts by third-party applications (I mostly read twitter in a text-only client, which greatly cuts down the dross). Every now and then they make unnecessary annoying changes, because they want to drive you to access it via the website or their own app so they can serve you adverts. But equally Twitter has a long history of being easy to create useful/entertaining bots for, so they're unlikely to break third-party access entirely.
It's slightly less evil than Facebook, in as much that it's a social media hellsite that's evolved out of a broadcast-sms-alike tool, rather than a social media hellsite that's evolved out of a rating-and-stalking-the-women-in-Mark-Zuckerberg's-college-classes tool. In practice, Twitter seems more inclined towards spontaneous interactions with interesting people and less about stoking 'engagement' within your own social bubble.
It's also much less of a walled-garden; reading a public twitter feed without a twitter account is practical. This is presumably because Facebook's business model of borging every useful tool on the internet until they control substantial amounts of everyone's online life has been eminently successful, while Twitter's seems to be based on repeated failure to understand what people actually use twitter for.
They're both pretty horrid for dredging up historical content. Again, this is less of a problem on Twitter, where the nature of the tool lends itself to more transient content.
The endgame, of course, is Facebook buying twitter.