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.