Inside the Network of Anonymous Men Destroying Young Women’s Lives

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’s 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].

How to Listen

You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how:

If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts and search for “uncanny valley.” We’re on Spotify too.

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.

Ej Dickson: Thank you for having me.

Zoë Schiffer: Can you talk us through what exactly is the burnerverse? How is it organized? Who exactly is part of it?

Ej Dickson: So, the burnerverse is a very loosely organized network. It's unfair to even say network because it's just kind of an amorphous community of college sports fan burner accounts. So, they're all anonymous or mostly anonymous accounts. And I think it's important to note that a lot of them are pretty innocuous, but there is a segment of this community that has emerged that is pretty violently racist and misogynistic and antisemitic. And this is the corner of the subculture that has sort of made a sport out of systemically doxing women. So, I initially found out about the burnerverse in February 2025, a few months, about nine months, before Maddie went viral. And I found out about it because I saw this young woman's name trending on X, and her name was Mary Kate Cornett. And I was really curious. I was like, who is this person? And it turned out to be an Ole Miss college student who there was a campus rumor, a salacious, defamatory rumor, about her sex life that had gone viral on campus that had been elevated to the mainstream and was going viral on X nationally because a bunch of prominent people had picked it up. Barstool Sports personalities, Pat McAfee, talked about it on his podcast. So, I was like, how does this happen? How does a girl's name trend nationally based on a completely unverifiable rumor? This is a private citizen. There's no real news interest here. How does this happen? And that's how I started digging into the burnerverse and how burner accounts made her name go viral.

Zoë Schiffer: Going back to Maddie's story, she gets alerted to the fact that these images and videos are going viral on campus. What was her immediate response? What avenues were available to her, I guess, in terms of reporting or getting the content taken down?

Ej Dickson: So, she had the presence of mind to go to the police department in Gainesville, where she went to school, fairly early. And she was receiving harassing phone calls basically every second of the day at that point from these burner accounts, calling her slut, calling her parents, telling that she had AIDS, that she was a crack whore. Just the most horrible things you can possibly imagine. She couldn't even turn off her phone, she told me, because her phone was ringing so much. She couldn't even press the button to turn it off. And so, she went to the Gainesville Police Department to complain about this, and they basically just told her, "Change your phone number." And she was like, "Oh, OK. Well, that's not really going to do anything." Also, the university contacted her because the university found out about the images going viral before she did, even. That's how massively widespread they were. And they opened up a Title IX investigation, but it was closed after about a month because she says the university told her that there was no evidence that the videos had been filmed on campus, so it was not within their jurisdiction. So, her initial options for recourse were pretty limited, at least at first.

Zoë Schiffer: I'm curious, can you talk through her sorority's response? Were they helpful?

Ej Dickson: I think she considered that one of the biggest betrayals is how her sorority sisters responded to all of this. Her sorority basically disavowed her immediately. They allegedly held meetings discussing how this incident would reflect on them. Many of her sorority sisters blocked her, unfollowed her. Again, I mean, this was a girl who was struggling. She was in her second year of college, 19 years old, drinking heavily, needed support, and your sorority sisters are supposed to stick with you through thick and thin. I mean, you're supposed to be bonded for life. And basically the second that this happens, they completely abandoned her is the way she tells it.

Zoë Schiffer: And eventually, she and her family try and find a lawyer, and you write in the story that it was difficult for them to find someone who could understand the scope of the problem. I believe the line in the story is like, "This wasn't a typical revenge porn case. This was much bigger than that."

Ej Dickson: Yeah, I think that's what was confusing to law enforcement and to the lawyers that the Kowalskis consulted as well. If this had been a simple case of a spurned ex-boyfriend posting a nude or a pornographic video nonconsensually, that would've been much easier to prosecute. That's something that law enforcement has seen before, but this wasn't that. This was a network of total strangers posting the nonconsensual intimate images of a girl they didn't even know, for no apparent reason. And there were so many obstacles in the way. They didn't know who was behind these accounts. They didn't know why they were posting them. They didn't know how they had obtained these videos. To this day, Maddie is not sure how her video was leaked. And I also think it really speaks to the real chasm between the speed with which the viral news cycle evolves and the speed with which our legislation evolves. It simply can't keep up.

Zoë Schiffer: So, there's a moment where I believe it's when she's starting to consult with lawyers. What does she ultimately decide?

Ej Dickson: She ultimately decides to go after the burner accounts, the anonymous men who shared her nonconsensual videos. My understanding is that it took a couple of months for the Gainesville Police Department to subpoena X for these guys' records. Two freshmen boys in a fraternity, Theta Chi, who she did not know. And a third man was also charged, who I believe was a former UF student who had transferred at that point.

Zoë Schiffer: You also write that people don't have a lot of recourse in terms of getting X to take immediate action. This is happening years after Elon Musk has purchased the platform formerly known as Twitter. He famously got rid of much of the trust and safety team. The content policies have been relaxed from what they used to be. And so, how responsive was the platform in getting the content to go away?

Ej Dickson: Well, I mean, the platform didn't respond to me when I asked for comment, and I had a lot of questions for them. I mean, I don't think that this would've happened were it not for Elon Musk acquiring X and dismantling the regulations because X's algorithm amplifies divisive or inflammatory content in such a way that it doesn't really matter what's trending. It's just going to be broadcast nationwide. And it's like a game of whack-a-mole. You can file a take-down request, and apparently the Kowalskis said that X was pretty responsive in terms of actually getting the videos down individually once they filed the request because they're legally required to do that because of the Take It Down Act. But, if you remove one, 10 more pop up in their stead. That's just the way the internet works.

Zoë Schiffer: As things stand now, has anyone specifically been held accountable for what happened to Maddie?

Ej Dickson: So, the men are being charged with sexual cyberharassment which is a misdemeanor that is punishable by up to one year in prison and an $1,000 fine. I believe one of them is ... The police department is alleging that he'd financially profited off of her humiliation. When I reached out to Theta Chi, their fraternity, they said that they were on interim suspension and completely disavowed their activities and said, "This is not what Theta Chi is about." I don't know if that was prompted by my reaching out or if that had already been underway prior. I don't want to speculate, but I had said that she will see them posting from parties and stuff.

Zoë Schiffer: And where does this leave Maddie?

Ej Dickson: She's traumatized. I mean, can you imagine the worst moment of your life goes viral when you're 19 years old, and you don't even remember it? She doesn't think she'll be able to date and find love. She thinks this is going to follow her wherever she goes for the rest of her life. And the first time I met her, she wasn't even particularly emotional about it. It was just fact for her. And I was just sitting there. I'm a parent. It broke my heart. And that's the thing that really haunted me after reporting this and what really stuck with me when I spoke to her best friend who's quoted in the article. They stole her youth. They stole her girlhood. They stole her optimism and her sense of hope and belief that she could do something great with her life. Because that's what college is all about, right? You're kind of on the precipice of all of that. And that just seems like the most egregious theft of all.

Zoë Schiffer: Her experience also isn't an isolated incident, right? How far-reaching is this? How many people has this happened to?

Ej Dickson: So, there are degrees of it. All told, I was able to identify about a little less than a dozen women across the country who had been doxed in this fashion and on this scale. They were all young women in their late teens, early 20s, college students or recently graduated from college, conventionally attractive, and they had all been subject to some sort of salacious rumor or had nonconsensual videos or images of them circulating and were perceived to have transgressed the boundaries of sexual norms, I guess, in some way was kind of the unifying criteria. But, the burner accounts were also doing this on a much smaller scale to teenage girls whose photos were posted on college's incoming students' Instagram pages. They were taking their photos and posting them and making fun of their bodies and the way they looked and posting their full names. Girls who weren't even in college yet, incoming freshmen, they were doxing on a much smaller scale. And they do that pretty regularly. Or, they'll take photos of somebody's dating profile, some girl's dating profile or a message, and they'll post it, and they'll release her name and make fun of her. So, it happens all the time. I think that it's really the scale that differs, but the exposure aspect of it happens all the time.

Zoë Schiffer: Going back to Maddie's story, I'm curious how she felt. Like you said, you talked to her after the article came out. Obviously, it's this decision that I think a lot of sources face where it's like, do you not speak out and hope that the story kind of goes away? Or, do you take the chance and try and take back a little of the narrative?

Ej Dickson: That was really difficult. That was something I was really concerned about because I thought that there was a possibility that it could renew the harassment against her. And we had a number of conversations about that. And I think she understood and understands the impact that her story has and that she has an opportunity to speak for other women who have been through this and to sort of ensure that shame switches sides, that she doesn't need to be ashamed of what happened to her. I think she was a little overwhelmed, but she's a very strong person.

Maddie Kowalski: I'd like to end this with something really important. Although I don't have control over what happened to me, I can control what I do moving forward, and I want to move forward with healing.

Zoë Schiffer: Here's Maddie again. We thought she should close out the story in her own words.

Maddie Kowalski: These last few weeks have been the darkest and hardest moments of my life, but I'm still here, and that's something that I'm really learning to be proud of. I'm taking steps to rebuild myself, to feel safe again, and to understand that what happened to me doesn't define me. And I know that this is a long path. I've unfortunately also realized that there are so many women and girls as well as men who go through things like this in silence, feeling alone or ashamed or afraid to speak. And if sharing my story can help even one person feel seen or teach one person why consent and decency matter, then it's worth it.

Zoë Schiffer: That's our show for today. We'll link to all the stories we spoke about in the show notes. Adriana Tapia produced this episode. It was fact-checked by Matt Giles and Daniel Roman. Kate Osborn is our executive producer, and Katie Drummond is WIRED's global editorial director.