Jon Pretty

I'm probably being naive, but wouldn't that make them different accounts? I think I followed it because its tagline mentioned "Phantom types".

Again, I'm really not accusing you of anything, and I don't think it was in any way constructive for Travis to do so, but the evidence is incontrovertible that it was a possibly-automated troll intentionally circumventing Twitter blocks to harass specific individuals.

The current one has a creation date of July 2017, though. Doesn't that mean that it hasn't been identified by and blocked by Twitter as a troll in almost three years?

The current one may in fact be an original that escaped my notice during the event. They may be altogether unrelated to the happenings (some third party may have been coopting their name and handle). It's probably impossible to know.

I suspect that "circumvention of blocking" was actually just the use of different account(s), then. And blocking still works adequately.

Doesn't explain why the accounts were once-use and mutually exclusive, or the obvious minor variation on name and handle. Blocking also doesn't work particularly well when you're harassed by an account which didn't exist a moment ago and won't exist a moment later.

That's what I meant, actually: It wasn't that the "block" relation between two accounts got hacked in some way. Blocking still can't protect against ephemeral trolling accounts.

Ah, we're on the same page then. :-) Yeah the block function works perfectly fine as designed, it's just that the design has no defense against this kind of attack.