You and I might be technical enough people to suss out little details, but I suspect the average person probably also wants to know whether or not something like Twitter testing a feature flag (Yes, really!) is affecting their timeline.

If it affects results in the slightest, I think that's what people are asking about.

Yeah, if the new senior dev screwed up a deployment and now football fans in Dallas are suddenly getting fewer posts about the most recent athlete scandal all because a regional deployment was the only thing doing relevance record keeping, then yes, that's a part of "the algorithm."