Hours later, the account related to the Anonymous Comrades Collective that posted the thread was deleted, and the account was suspended. On Friday, dozens of customers, together with a variety of researchers and journalists, started discussing the incident and posting a number of the particulars of the analysis, together with Graebener’s identify.

X locked down many of those accounts and ordered them to delete the offending tweet to get full entry to their accounts again. Among these focused had been Jared Holt, a senior analysis analyst on the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, who covers right-wing extremism; Hannah Gais, a senior analysis analyst at Southern Poverty Law Center; and Steven Monacelli, an investigative journalist for the Texas Observer. (WIRED has additionally printed Monacelli’s work.)

X additionally imposed a ban on sharing the hyperlink to the Anonymous Comrades Collective blog detailing its analysis. WIRED verified this on Monday morning by making an attempt to submit the hyperlink, solely to be met with a pop-up message that learn: ‘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.

An X consultant says that the corporate, following a evaluate of the actions taken towards the accounts of Anonymous Comrades Collective, Holt, Gais, Monacelli, and Caraballo, stood by its determination.

“The posts that were removed were all actioned correctly,” says Joe Benarroch, head of enterprise operations at X, including that the posts violated the corporate’s “posting private information policy” for “outing the identity of an anonymous user.”

While X does have a coverage round sharing non-public info, a evaluate of the company’s terms of service exhibits no point out of a coverage associated to outing the identification of an nameless person, and Benarroch didn’t reply to a request for clarification.

“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 tells WIRED. “I’ve never seen enforcement like this before.”