A College Girl Was Exploited on Camera. A Network of Anonymous Men Got to Work

A College Girl Was Exploited on Camera. A Network of Anonymous Men Got to Work. These campaigns were the work of the burnerverse (or “beev,” or “BV”), a loosely connected network of anonymous “burner” accounts on X, mostly operated by students and alumni, with the primary purpose of discussing college sports.

What happened

Kowalski would later learn that the image was making the rounds on Snapchat, and people were talking about it on the anonymous campus social network YikYak. Kowalski had heard about this happening to other college girls before; one of them, a University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) student named Mary Kate Cornett, had been doxed in the same way nine months prior. The virality follows a specific pattern: salacious gossip about a college girl’s sex life, or nude photos and videos of her, make their way to YikYak or Snapchat before being disseminated by burner accounts on public social media platforms.

Networks of a Big 10 university, like Michigan State or the University of Maryland, will have a slightly different flavor than that of an LSU or an Ole Miss, which are part of the Southeastern Conference. “We need another college girl to get exposed for a revival. ” Another: “Feels like a national holiday every time a new whore gets exposed on the BV. ”In less than 24 hours, #Maddiekowalski was trending on X nationwide, with more than 1,200 posts using the hashtag.

Photograph: Sean Gardner/Getty ImagesThe BV “whoreverse,” as some burner accounts call it, started to coalesce in June 2024, when an account named Arthur Cacciatore posted the name of an undergrad at a large Southern state school, who was falsely rumored to have slept “with like 35% of the SEC. ” The girl’s name became a trending topic on X, with Barstool Sports writer Jack Mac amplifying it to his 146,000 followers; the post got 815,000 views. (Due to the traumatizing nature of the burnerverse’s campaigns against these women, WIRED is withholding their names and altering details to protect their anonymity, unless they’ve gone public with their experiences, like Cornett and Kowalski. )From there, the burnerverse started systemically seeking out young, attractive college women to shame on a national stage.

Since Elon Musk acquired the social network in 2022, its algorithm has regularly boosted racist, misogynistic, and antisemitic content, making it the ideal petri dish for a coordinated harassment campaign.

The wider picture

Commission spokesperson Jeremy Michaels says the testimony will focus on the alleged infiltration of the JMPD by criminal networks, as well as alleged collusion between JMPD officers and criminal syndicates. “Upon the resumption of its public hearings on Tuesday, the Commission will shift focus to the Johannesburg Metro Police Department (JMPD), one of the law enforcement agencies listed in the Commission’s terms of reference. ” “Tuesday marks day 173 of the Commission’s hearings and the Commission will hear testimony regarding infiltration of the JMPD by criminal networks and collusion between JMPD officers and criminal syndicates,” adds Michaels.

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His daughter had been extolling the AI chatbot she was using to help her with college work.

What has been reported

This “happy accident” turned an unpredictable, experimental system – a neural network trained on billions of human-authored texts from across the internet – into an app on people’s phones, right there on the screen beside your emails and Google Maps. As Kowalski scrolled, she saw what appeared to be hundreds of messages about a “DZ” girl. (She was in the sorority Delta Zeta. ) They were now referring to not just an image, but a video. Around 6 that night, an anonymous account on X with the handle @SteveCumfull posted the video, saying: “Meet Maddie Kowalski, queen of Delta Zeta. ” Kowalski had no idea who the poster was, but she immediately identified the setting in one shot as Fort.

What had been a piece of salacious on-campus gossip, transmitted via anonymous social media and group texts, was now a national story. “Put your children’s college savings into this,” they tweeted. @SteveCumfull could have been anyone: a close friend, a neighbor, a mutual with an axe to grind. Over the next 24 hours, Kowalski sat paralyzed on her couch as anonymous people on the internet endlessly harassed her; they posted her old photos, her dad’s LinkedIn, and even his golf handicap.

They called and texted her parents all through the night, saying things like, “I gave your daughter drugs and fucked her”; one anonymous man told Kowalski’s father he’d had sex with her and had since tested positive for HIV while playing the call live on Spaces, X’s live chat feature. Kowalski quit her part-time gig as a bottle girl and server after the burnerverse harassed her employer.

What happens next

There’s also some level of engagement between the burners and college athletics departments: Users often tag coaches or athletes to try to get their attention, and sometimes the more influential accounts will instruct people to “comment on potential recruits’ online stuff and tell them how great [the school] is,” the burner says. There’s also evidence that some college sports athletics departments are aware of the burners and even maintain cordial, semi-symbiotic relationships with them, akin to the dynamic between a brand and an influencer account.

It’s guys with wealthy families and support systems and college educations. ”For many of these accounts, the ultimate objective is going viral, through whatever means necessary. The most well-known case is Mary Kate Cornett, a then 18-year-old University of Mississippi student who went viral in February 2025, after an X user with the handle @thekendallroy tweeted, “Anyone else hearing rumblings of this Ole Miss girl banging her boyfriend’s Dad? ” The rumor was false, but @thekendallroy’s post exploded, racking up 313,000 views in just under two days.

“It’s like they have this blueprint for what to do every time they decide to destroy a girl’s life,” she says. She has spent the past year and a half working with lawyers and forensic experts to identify burner accounts. Then your life moves on, and [the girls’ lives] stop. ”The most well known victim of the burnerverse is Mary Kate Cornett, a University of Mississippi student who went viral for a false rumor about her sex life.

The report has been compiled by The Daily Waves using information reported across wired.com, sabcnews.com, techcrunch.com, theguardian.com. Details are presented according to the information available at the time of publication and may change as authorities, organisers or other relevant parties provide updates.