Related Articles
X has locked and suspended the accounts of journalists and researchers who shared the alleged identity of a neo-Nazi cartoonist known as Stonetoss after the cartoonist appealed to site owner Elon Musk.
The incident, critics say, highlights once again how Musk has not only welcomed extremists onto his platform but has repeatedly boosted their conspiracies, engaged with their accounts, and seems to have protected them from scrutiny.
A lengthy X thread posted by the antifascist research group Anonymous Comrades Collective last week claimed that Stonetoss is a man named Hans Kristian Graebener from Spring, Texas. Stonetoss cartoons, which feature simple and colorful imagery coupled with racist, homophobic, and antisemitic language, have become hugely popular among right-wing communities since they were first published at least seven years ago.
In its telling, the antifascist research group linked the Stonetoss cartoonist to another anonymous racist cartoonist known as Red Panels by comparing their voices from appearances on extremist podcasts. The researchers say they found an email address linked to Graebener that was used to register the Red Panels accounts on the far-right social media platform Gab. Then, the group says, it was able to match up comments made by Stonetoss with events in Graebener’s life. In one case, Graebener took a trip to Japan in 2019 with a Houston IT company he then worked for; at the same time, Stonetoss posted a picture on X of a “welcome to Japan” sign with the comment, “Finally made it to the ethnostate fellas.” The research group has been doing this kind of work for years and has been credited with unmasking numerous other extremists, including those involved with a neo-Nazi homeschool network.
Graebener has not disputed anything the researchers uncovered. He did not respond directly to requests for comment from WIRED to his personal email address or the email address on the Stonetoss website, and he did not pick up calls from phone numbers associated with his name.
Days after this story was published, an email from the admin account on the Stonetoss website sent to a generic WIRED email address disputed Stonetoss’s neo-Nazi label. “I have rejected the accusation of being a "nazi" at length, for years, on my own website,” the email read. “Not only that, but my statement also provides examples of my work that oppose nazi ideology. As such, the label of "nazi" is not consistent with the facts.” The Stonetoss website, however, does not mention disputing this characterization, and has instead published numerous cartoons explicitly endorsing Nazi ideology, like one that uses the term Übermensch, which Nazi’s used to describe the master race, orr another from 2019 that referred to Hitler as “an honest politician.”
The Anonymous Comrade Collective thread got a lot of attention on X, racking up at least 13.5 million views. On Thursday, the Stonetoss account appealed to X users who have “a direct line” to Musk, X’s owner, to help to get the thread deleted. Musk has, in the past, shared an altered version of a Stonetoss cartoon about the collapse of society. “If Elon's idea of a ‘free speech’ website is one where people can be intimidated into silence, the outcome will be a site where the Stasi will drive out all dissent,” Stonetoss wrote. The account also tagged Musk and offered to share a list of people to target.
Most PopularGearThe Top New Features Coming to Apple’s iOS 18 and iPadOS 18By Julian ChokkattuCultureConfessions of a Hinge Power UserBy Jason ParhamSecurityWhat You Need to Know About Grok AI and Your PrivacyBy Kate O'FlahertyGearHow Do You Solve a Problem Like Polestar?By Carlton Reid
In a subsequent post, Stonetoss said this appeal was not about him but about other “artists.”
“This is about others I know personally,” Stonetoss wrote. “There is a whole ecosystem of artists out there who cannot (or have stopped) making art because of people on twitter organized to punish them IRL for doing so.” The cartoonist also added that sales of his plush toy were “going gangbusters” since his alleged identity was revealed.
Hours later, the account associated with the Anonymous Comrades Collective that posted the thread was deleted, and the account was suspended. On Friday, dozens of users, including a number of researchers and journalists, began discussing the incident and posting some of the details of the research, including Graebener’s name.
X locked down many of these accounts and ordered them to delete the offending tweet to get full access to their accounts back. Among those targeted were Jared Holt, a senior research analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, who covers right-wing extremism; Hannah Gais, a senior research analyst at Southern Poverty Law Center; and Steven Monacelli, an investigative journalist for the Texas Observer. (WIRED has also published Monacelli’s work.)
X also imposed a ban on sharing the link to the Anonymous Comrades Collective blog detailing its research. WIRED verified this on Monday morning by attempting to post the link, only to be met with a pop-up message that read: ‘We can't complete this request because this link has been identified by X or our partners as being potentially harmful.”
Even with the crackdown from X, people kept sharing details of the Stonetoss investigation.
“We all just started posting his name; it was like a Streisand effect,” Alejandra Caraballo, a clinical instructor at the Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic, tells WIRED. “They're just trying to censor his name, and then everyone started getting their accounts locked.”
Caraballo, who shared screenshots of the messages she received from X with WIRED, managed to circumvent the initial ban by appealing it and claiming, ironically, that she was the victim of mass reporting from antifa who were attempting to silence her right-wing viewpoint.
While that appeal was successful, Caraballo was quickly locked out of her account again when she changed her username to “Hans Kristian Graebener is stonetoss.” That resulted in a 12-hour suspension, and when her account was reinstated she was soon punished for earlier posts that shared screenshots of information about Graebener. Caraballo’s account has now been suspended for seven days. Shortly after this article was originally published, Caraballo’s account was restored by X, without an explanation.
An X representative says that the company, following a review of the actions taken against the accounts of Anonymous Comrades Collective, Holt, Gais, Monacelli, and Caraballo, stood by its decision.
“The posts that were removed were all actioned correctly,” says Joe Benarroch, head of business operations at X, adding that the posts violated the company’s “posting private information policy” for “outing the identity of an anonymous user.”
Most PopularGearThe Top New Features Coming to Apple’s iOS 18 and iPadOS 18By Julian ChokkattuCultureConfessions of a Hinge Power UserBy Jason ParhamSecurityWhat You Need to Know About Grok AI and Your PrivacyBy Kate O'FlahertyGearHow Do You Solve a Problem Like Polestar?By Carlton Reid
While X does have a policy around sharing private information, the company’s terms of service on March 20 did not mention a policy related to outing the identity of an anonymous user, and Benarroch did not respond to a request for clarification. On March 21, after WIRED published this story, X updated its privacy policy to specifically prohibit posting the ”the identity of an anonymous user, such as their name or media depicting them.”
“According to X’s terms of service, posting someone's name does not constitute doxing, but, many accounts, including my own, have been made to delete posts that merely mention the name of the racist and antisemitic cartoonist Stonetoss,” Monacelli told WIRED before the change. “I've never seen enforcement like this before.”
This policy change could possibly be in response to a post last month from Musk when he wrote, “Any doxxing, which includes revealing real names, will result in account suspension.” Still, in an interview with Don Lemon released on Monday, Musk said that moderation of hate speech is akin to “censorship.”
There are now hundreds of posts on the platform which name Stonetoss as Graebener. There are also numerous accounts on the platform that changed their profile name to “Hans Kristian Graebener is stonetoss”—and they haven’t all been suspended.
“This is completely arbitrary and under Twitter's own community standards it says that a name is never considered private information,” Caraballo tells WIRED. “There's an immense double standard here of the neo-Nazi comic guy being protected” by X. But then, she says, “The people that do this to anyone on the left are not only followed by [Musk] but are boosted by him. It's completely inconsistent.” To her, it seems that whoever Musk favors gets protected, and anyone else is banned. “This is also a pretext for them to be able to go after anyone that they dislike,” Caraballo says.”
Caraballo and others have pointed to accounts like Libs of TikTok and far-right troll Andy Ngo, both of which have shared private information about trans people but have not had their accounts suspended. Musk has also engaged with posts that doxed individuals on X, with seemingly no recourse for those accounts.
For anyone who has tracked Musk’s actions since taking control of X in October 2022, this incident is no surprise. Musk has systematically removed the guardrails the company had put in place to prevent hate speech on the platform and has welcomed back racists, antisemites, and transphobic posters who had been previously banned.
In recent months, Musk has repeatedly endorsed racist conspiracies like the great replacement theory and has engaged with numerous accounts spreading disinformation and hate speech. Just this weekend, Musk interacted with Martin Sellner, the founder of a white ethnonationalist group in Austria who previously communicated with and accepted a donation from the man who shot and killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019.
After they deleted their posts, most of those restricted for sharing Graebener’s name have had their accounts unlocked. However, the Anonymous Comrade Collective account that shared the details about Graebener is also suspended, and a representative tells WIRED they are unsure when or if it will come back.
Update 3/21/2024, 10:20 am ET: Updated to include mention that X has now updated its privacy policy to prohibit posting the ”the identity of an anonymous user, such as their name or media depicting them.” This article also has been updated with mention of Alejandra Caraballo’s recently restored X account.
Update 3/26/2024, 12:30 pm ET: Updated to include comment from Stonetoss.
