The Burnerverse: How Anonymous Accounts Turned Non-Consensual Sexual Videos Into Online Harassment

Last year, Maddie Kowalski was an average sophomore at the University of Florida. Then explicit, non-consensual videos involving her began spreading across a series of burner accounts on X.

This week, Zoe Schiffer speaks with WIRED senior writer Ej Dickson about the Burnerverse—a vast, loosely organized network of anonymous accounts that has turned the sexual humiliation of young women into an online participatory sport.

You can follow Zoë Schiffer on Bluesky. @zoeschiffer You can follow Ej Dickson on Bluesky at @ejdickson. Please contact us at [email protected].

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Transcript

Note: This is an automated transcript and may contain errors.

Content warning: This conversation includes non-consensual sexual content and references to self-harm. Please listen carefully.

Zoe Schiffer: Before I get into it, I’d like to give you a quick warning about the content. This conversation includes non-consensual sexual content and references to self-harm. Please listen carefully.

Maddie Kowalski: When I heard that someone had sent nude photos of me to my friends at FSU, the photos had me super drunk.

Zoe Schiffer: Maddie Kowalski.

Maddie Kowalski: So right after this, I started getting flooded with messages saying that the whole school Yik Yak was talking about me.

Zoe Schiffer: Yik Yak is a popular platform among college students that allows users to post anonymously within a certain geographic area.

Maddie Kowalski: Everything was happening really fast, and I couldn’t understand anything.

Zoe Schiffer: Maddie heard about one photo, but there was a series of videos showing her apparently naked and having sex. Maddie remembers being very drunk that night.

Maddie Kowalski: I felt really alienated from the girl in the video because I had very little memory of what happened.

Zoe Schiffer: Obviously, she didn’t consent to these things. She didn’t consent to being filmed, and she didn’t consent to those films being posted online. But now X was all over it.

Maddie Kowalski: At that moment, I felt my whole world collapse. Everything was being shared and reposted so fast that there was no stopping it.

Zoe Schiffer: The video had officially gone viral. The hashtag #MaddieKowalski trended on X nationwide and was viewed more than 8.5 million times.

For the next 24 hours, Maddie sat paralyzed on her couch while anonymous people on the internet harassed her. They posted an old photo from before the night the video was recorded. They called and texted her parents throughout the night. An anonymous man told her father that he had sex with his girlfriend and later tested positive for HIV.

People on X were betting on whether she would start an OnlyFans account or die by suicide by the end of the week.

The people behind the harassment were not strangers in the far corners of the internet. Often, they were her literal classmates, hiding behind anonymous burner accounts that were primarily used to celebrate college sports.

From WIRED’s Uncanny Valley, I’m Zoe Schiffer, contributing editor. WIRED senior writer Ej Dickson spent months following Maddie’s story and investigating what became known as the Burnerverse: a vast, loosely organized network of anonymous accounts that turned the sexual humiliation of young women into a kind of participatory sport.

Zoe Schiffer: Ej, thank you very much for coming.