Last year, Maddie Kowalski was a regular sophomore attending the University of Florida. Then a series of burner accounts on X started proliferating explicit, nonconsensual videos of her. This week, Zoë Schiffer sits down with WIRED senior writer EJ Dickson to discuss the burnerverse, a sprawling, loosely organized network of anonymous accounts that have turned the sexual humiliation of young women into an online participatory sport.
You can follow Zoë Schiffer on Bluesky at @zoeschiffer and EJ Dickson on Bluesky at @ejdickson. Write to us at [email protected].
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Transcript
Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Zoë Schiffer: A quick content warning before we dive in. This conversation includes descriptions of nonconsensual sexual content and references to self-harm. Please take care while listening.
Maddie Kowalski: When I heard that someone had sent a nude photograph of me to his friends at FSU, and in this picture I was heavily intoxicated.
Zoë Schiffer: This is Maddie Kowalski.
Maddie Kowalski: So right after this, I started getting flooded with messages that I was being talked about all over my school’s Yik Yak.
Zoë Schiffer: Yik Yak is a platform popular among college students where you can post anonymously if you’re within a specific geographic radius.
Maddie Kowalski: Everything was just happening really fast, and I couldn’t comprehend any of it.
Zoë Schiffer: What Maddie had heard about was a single photo, but there were a series of videos in which she was visibly out of it, naked, and performing sexual acts. Maddie remembers, well, she was really drunk that night.
Maddie Kowalski: I felt really detached from the girl in the videos because I had so little memory of the events.
Zoë Schiffer: Obviously, she hadn’t consented to any of this, not to being filmed, and certainly not to those films being posted online. But now, it was all over X.
Maddie Kowalski: And at this moment, I just felt my whole world collapse. Everything was being shared and reposted so fast, and I couldn’t do anything to stop it.
Zoë Schiffer: The videos had officially gone viral. #MaddieKowalski was trending on X nationwide, and it was viewed more than 8.5 million times. For the next 24 hours, Maddie sat paralyzed on her couch while anonymous internet people harassed her. They posted old photos from before the night the videos were taken. They called and texted her parents all throughout the night. One anonymous man told her father that he’d had sex with her and had since tested positive for HIV. People on X were placing bets on whether by the end of the week she would either start an OnlyFans or kill herself. Here’s the thing. The people behind this weren’t strangers in some far-off corner of the internet. In many cases, they were her literal classmates hiding behind anonymous burner accounts, mostly used to celebrate college sports. From WIRED’s Uncanny Valley, I’m Zoë Schiffer, contributing editor. WIRED senior writer EJ Dickson spent months following Maddie’s story and what’s become known as the burnerverse, a sprawling, loosely organized network of anonymous accounts that has turned the sexual humiliation of young women into a kind of participatory sport. EJ, thank you so much for coming on.