Without taking a stance on either side of this contentious issue, I would note that it should be technically feasible to offer an option which would auto-block any account that hasn't established a certain extent of "not a troll sockpuppet" bona fides - for example, by being more than a few weeks old, and having a certain degree of engagement with the community at large. Accounts which fail to meet these criteria, and persist in attempts to abuse someone already recognized as being targeted, might be automatically suspended or banned.

I don't care for Twitter particularly, but it's a thing that exists, and it's not likely to go away any time soon. And I don't care for shitposter brigades at all. As the current brouhaha demonstrates, manual intervention in high-profile cases is no solution at all. Twitter's engineering team is easily capable of an automated solution; all they need is for their management to turn them loose on the problem. I'm not sure why that hasn't yet happened. Of course it's impossible for any automated solution to make everyone happy - but what we're looking at right now is a response that has made everyone unhappy. Twitter can do better. I hope they take this incident as sufficient reason to do so.