Don’t worry, guys. Twitter isn’t selectively censoring users who engage in certain types of speech. It’s just making it harder for you to find them.

If you’re confused by that statement, you’re not alone.

Twitter co-founder Kayvon Beykpour and policy and trust and safety lead Vijaya Gadde co-authored a blog post this week explaining the popular social media site isn’t quietly censoring users, but that it’s simply making it more difficult for certain content to be seen by the public.

“People are asking us if we shadow ban. We do not,” the post reads, adding a definition for the term “shadow ban.”

“The best definition we found is this: deliberately making someone’s content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it, unbeknownst to the original poster,” Beykpour and Gadde maintain.

They add [emphasis added]: “We do not shadow ban. You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow ( although you may have to do more work to find them, like go directly to their profile). And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.”

Wait. What?

The claim here is that Twitter doesn’t “deliberately” make certain user content “undiscoverable,” it only makes it unlikely that anyone will see it. That sounds a lot like … a shadow ban. I’m confused.

“We do rank tweets and search results. We do this because Twitter is most useful when it’s immediately relevant,” the Twitter post read. “These ranking models take many signals into consideration to best organize tweets for timely relevance. We must also address bad-faith actors who intend to manipulate or detract from healthy conversation.”

The short of it is this: Twitter doesn’t appear to be quietly banning people who haven’t explicitly violated the site’s terms of service. Twitter isn’t making it such that certain accounts are hidden entirely from other users or general searches. Twitter is, however, cracking down on content that appears to be troll-ish or automated in nature. The company is making it more difficult for that content to appear in general timelines and searches.

But it seems like a contradiction to say "we don't deliberately make content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it, unbeknownst to the original poster,” while also saying, “you're going to have to do more work to find certain content, like go directly to certain profiles.”

Look, Twitter is not a public utility. It’s a private company. It can censor and/or ban whomever it wants. It has the right to censor people who are merely annoying. I support that right! More power to the company.

But I’d prefer it if Twitter’s brass were a bit more forthright about it their practice of shuffling content to the bottom of the deck. The explainer published this week confuses more than it clarifies.