"In reality, many of the people targeted by the Block Bot were political critics and sceptics who disagreed with its creators’ hardline progressive beliefs."

I'm really not surprised by this. The norm now is to silence and destroy your opposition by calling them bigots, racists, and bullies.

I've seen this in many of the open source project discussions (I subscribe to a few mailing lists). A contributor won't want any critics and will call anyone that disagrees a "bully".