#hans kristian graebener

[thewebcomicsreview]

so what's your take on the recent "stonetoss is a much better comic than haus of decline because it has fewer words" over on twitter?

I really wanted to reply with a snarky dismissive one-liner. I had one written and everything, but then I wanted to make sure I understood the context and looked into this and ugh. Now I have to explain Twitter drama, this sucks.

Okay. Christ.

Haus of Decline makes this comic

The comic pops up again, and a person named Basil sees it and has a take that it has too many words.

As arguably the most prominent Webcomic Critic out there (which is the say, the only one still doing it), I kind of prefer the wordless version as well, but it's a matter of taste, more than an "objectively correct" take.

Basil then follows up on that take with a rather spicier one

It's worth noting here that Basil is saying Hans Kristian Graebener is "better" in the sense that they believe it's more effective propaganda, not in their own personal opinion of quality. And that's....arguable? For one, Haus of Decline isn't really trying to be left-wing propaganda, it's just shitposting, and for two I think Hans Kristian Graebener's effectiveness is way more complicated and sophisticated than just "brevity". And for three, saying Hans Kristian Graebener is "better comics" is really ill-advised, especially given some context I'll reveal shortly.

Haus sees this, calls Basil a moron, and it turns into a dumb stupid internet argument where both people look bad. And being, again, the top Webcomic Critic, I can confirm that sometimes when you call a webcomic bad the creator will get mad at you over it and that's just something you have to expect and live with and try not to beclown yourself in response to. I don't think Basil responded well here, and "just learn to take criticism" is a pretty common and loaded phrase in Webcomics Discourse. Still, whatever. A questionable take led to a short slap fight. That would be the end of it.

Except. The context.

Seven or eight months ago, Basil made this tweet.

Which is a far better tweet, and is now a meme used by liberals in intra-left twitter discord fights to dunk on the anti-voting Trump-curious twitter left. This tweet also came around the time Will Stancil was whipping a lot of normie liberals to push back against the anti-Biden narrative and obviously the election itself has led a notable shift in the vibes where you're seeing a lot more "Biden's not that bad" takes and even a bit of "Actually, Biden is good and I'm tired of pretending he's not" in leftist spaces. And if you follow my personal account you'll know that my vibes have also shifted in that direction a lot. Basil obviously didn't cause the shift, even Stancil didn't, it was the election, but it's their name on the top of the tweet that's used as an anti-anti-voting meme that the left still doesn't has a great response to, so a lot of leftists fucking hate Basil. The kind of passionate hatred you only feel when you're getting clowned on by Matthew fucking Yglesias. So there's a huge hate mob against Basil in the way that hate mobs tend to occur.

This all attracts the attention of Hans Kristian Graebener, who pops out a comic taking a shot at Haus over this. Which is, honestly, a much better example of why Hans Kristian Graebener is effective propaganda than the brevity thing, because god damn did that pour gasoline on the fire, and....well....tldr:

My take is that this whole fight is incredibly stupid, no one involved looks good, and the only one benefiting from it is the literal fucking Nazi.

[antifainternational]

Exposing fascist cartoonist/propagandist Han Kristian "StoneToss" Graebener.

[terriwriting]

Musk and Twitter are being accused of hypocrisy, given their claimed free-speech aspirations. But it's not as if there's much history of him or it living up to those standards in the first place. Twitter often censors commentators there—left wing ones, more often than not. Its policy against doxxing was applied here, but reactionary accounts are generally free to publicize the identities behind internet accounts that displease them and there are examples of Musk personally approving of doxxing individuals on the platform.

[nando161mando]

stonetoss is still Hans Kristian Graebener and he still lives at 4910 Hennington Drive, Spring Texas 77388

spread the word

[ralfmaximus]

Comics and cartoons can be used to entertain, educate and enlighten. In the case of the right-wing web comic creator StoneToss and his eponymous cartoon, they can also be used to spread racism, antisemitism, xenophobia and anti-LGBTQ+ bigotry. Since 2017 StoneToss has been doing just that. It has an exceedingly wide presence among neo-Nazis and white nationalists. The easy-to-digest three- or four-panel comics are accessible vectors for spreading right-wing hate and, as we will show, real-world violence.

Hans Kristian Graebener of Spring, Texas has been identified as the cartoonist behind StoneToss and Red Panels, two horrifying web comics popular among Nazis & MAGA weirdos.

Hans Kristian Graebener of Spring, Texas does not want you to know that, and has been frantically trying to hide this information.

Elon Musk is a fan and has proactively deleted twitter posts discussing Hans Kristian Graebener of Spring, Texas and his Nazi rhetoric.

Wouldn't it be funny if that backfired, and Hans Kristian Graebener of Spring, Texas was in the news forever?

[nyxieluvs]

Remember!

If you keep fucking doxxing trans people, a community that is known for having a shitload of programmers and tech enthusiasts, you cannot be surprised when you get the same treatment!

[transcendingblood]

Some very chill things happening on Elon Musk’s Twitter™️ right now.

Also for some reason the support email still uses the name Twitter lmfao.

[quasi-normalcy]

The cartoonist behind the infamous neonazi comic StoneToss has been revealed (CW for extreme racism, antisemitism, transphobia, etc.), and his name is Hans Kristian Graebener, an IT worker from Texas. We even learn how he feels about his dick, so that's fun.

[mariacallous]

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 to requests for comment from WIRED to his personal email address nor to the email address on the Stonetoss website, and he did not pick up calls from phone numbers associated with his name.

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.

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.”

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.

[dirtreally]

i cant believe the stone toss motherfucker looks like this and is called motherfucking HANS KRISTIAN GRAEBENER. hahaahaghooly shit man. beyond parody

[bonmonjour]

this Hans Kristian Graebener of Spring, TX stan should kill himself I think

[chronivore]

The identity of the 'man' behind the well-known,hitherto anonymous, Neo-Nazi webcomic Stonetoss has been discovered.

He is this man, Hans Kristian Graebener, from Spring, Texas.

[nickshutter]

As much as I'd love for Hans Kristian "Stonetoss" Graebener of Spring, Texas to get fired for (among other things) attending a neo-Nazi rally and then fail to find employment for the rest of his life, I have a hard time believing his employers/coworkers don't already know what kind of person he is. Beyond background checks, these kinds of people aren't always subtle in real life

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

On today's episode of "March Madness": Stonetoss' identity has been leaked.

What’s even more nuts is that he has the single most Nazi name I have ever heard in my life—Hans Kristian Graebener. It’s just so on the nose lmao

[nando161mando]

I'm honestly not surprised that Hans Kristian Graebener who lives at 4910 Hennington Drive, Spring TX 77388 would defend the hawk tuah bitch, just seems normal for a clout chasing soulless subhuman like that

[parageist]

😭

also the fact that Hans Kristian Graebener from Spring, Texas is going back to making comics as usual after being “cancelled” and doxxed shows how little danger “cancelling” is to right wingers. they act like it’s this huge big thing but their career isn’t affected at all lmao.