Are liberals suppressing conservative ideas by gaming Twitter?

In 2014 a study from the Pew Research Journalism Project found that “liberals are more likely to block or unfriend someone online because they disagree with something they have posted.” Without diving into the merits this kind of ideological blocking, let’s just examine the effect.

We can assume this behavior demonstrated on Facebook carries over to liberals on Twitter, and there’s some pretty compelling anecdotal evidence to back it up given the popularity of Block Together.

Block Together is a tool that was developed to prevent harassment on Twitter by creating mass blocking lists. An individual can create a list of Twitter users they block, then share that list so others can easily upload it to their profile and block those individuals. Some of these lists include hundreds of thousands of Twitter accounts. This ability to share and upload blocklists can be abused by those on the left side of the political spectrum, perhaps unintentionally.