"The practice of shadow banning essentially involves making posts visible only to the person who created them and invisible to their intended audience"
There is a substantial difference between tweets not being promoted by the algorithm and tweets being invisible. A "shadow-banned" user's tweets would be invisible to even their followers.
Yeah, the Twitter execs specifically denied that they apply filters based on political views. From your own link:
> To be clear, our behavioral ranking doesn't make judgments based on political views
The "conspiracy theory" is that Twitter was deliberately targeting conservatives for their politics, not that the site had moderation functions.
Matt Binder: https://twitter.com/redsteeze/status/1601142989061246976/pho...
Tweeter Execs denying: https://www.newsweek.com/twitter-shadow-banning-republicans-...