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
, a sprawling, loosely organized network of anonymous accounts that have turned the sexual humiliation of young women into an online participatory sport.
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Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
: 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.
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
So right after this, I started getting flooded with messages that I was being talked about all over my school’s Yik Yak
students where you can post anonymously if you’re within a specific geographic radius.
Everything was just happening really fast, and I couldn’t comprehend any of it
: 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.
I felt really detached from the girl in the videos because I had so little memory of the events
: 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.
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
: 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
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
, I’m Zoë Schiffer, contributing editor. WIRED senior writer EJ Dickson spent months following Maddie’s story and what’s become known as the
, 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.
: Can you talk us through what exactly is the burnerverse? How is it organized? Who exactly is part of it?
: 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.
: 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 re