Hours later, the account associated with the Anonymous Comrades Collective that had 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 details of the investigation, including Graebener’s name.
X shut down many of these accounts and ordered them to delete the offending tweet to regain full access to their accounts. Among the targets were Jared Holta senior research analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, who focuses on right-wing extremism; Hanna Gais, a senior research analyst at the 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 his research in detail. WIRED verified this on Monday morning by attempting to post the link, but was met with a pop-up message that read: ‘We cannot complete this request because this link has been identified by X or our partners as potentially malicious. ”
Even with X’s crackdown, people continued to share details about 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 just tried to censor his name, and then everyone started blocking their accounts.”
Caraballo, who shared screenshots of the messages she received from to silence.
Although that appeal was successful, Caraballo was quickly banned from 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 quickly punished for previous posts sharing screenshots containing information about Graebener. Caraballo’s account has now been suspended for seven days. Shortly after this article was originally published, Caraballo’s account was reinstated by X without any explanation.
A representative of
“The posts that were removed were all handled appropriately,” said Joe Benarroch, chief operating officer at an anonymous user announced.”
Although X has a policy regarding sharing private information, the company terms of service did not mention a policy regarding disclosing the identity of an anonymous user on March 20, and Benarroch did not respond to a request for clarification. On March 21, after WIRED published this story, X has updated its privacy policy to specifically prohibit “the posting of an anonymous user’s identity, such as his or her name or media in which he or she is depicted.”