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. Another posted on X placing bets on whether, by the end of the coming week, she’d start an OnlyFans or kill herself.
Kowalski called her best friend, Lexie Blake, who was then a sophomore at the University of Mississippi. She “wasn’t even really saying words,” Blake recounts. “She was just sobbing, hysterical.” When Kowalski’s father showed up at her apartment, she was too humiliated to face him. She tried to jump out of her fifth-floor window.
By Monday afternoon, #Maddiekowalski was trending on X nationwide, with more than 1,200 posts using the hashtag. Content about her—much of it showing her incapacitated, naked, and engaging in sex acts—had been viewed more than 8.5 million times.
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. 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.
But Kowalski was learning in real time that, outside of talking shit about athletes and posting photos of crushed red Solo cups, this faceless corner of the internet has another mission: destroying the lives of young women.
Nothing new under the sun, as they say. Frats and jocks being assholes to everybody, getting away with it.
The coordinated anonymous online harassment campaign specifically targeting young women is rather new.
Online is new. But that’s it.
You’re kidding right? This has been a thing for more than a decade!
What burns my ass is that every thing we do online is monitored and tracked at such a granular level, retailers can build a hyper-accurate profile of you off of your digital exhaust.
The NSA collects ALL traffic and dumps it into a hole in their giant data centers.
The police can just skip the warrant and buy your browsing data from data brokers.
So they all know what type of porn you like, what sites you view, what you buy, where you go, when you do it and a million other things–but they can’t find a few knuckle dragging cunts who harass strangers? What the FUCK is the point of all the surveillance?!
Oh, that’s right, it’s not about solving crime or helping people, it’s about preserving the current fucked-up power dynamic. Remember this shit the next time you go past a fucking Flock camera. The data will always be used against you, but never to help you.
Yeah “new” meaning in the history of assholes on campus. Relatively.
And of course data could be collected and used to punish the perpetrators and prevent future abuses - as it always could have been.
“Good ol’ boys” is also not new. It’s as old as time.
Just because it’s not new doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep talking about it. We should be bringing attention to this, putting pressure on those in charge to hold these predators accountable.
Absolutely.
Edit: Replied to the wrong comment, sorry!
Online is a powerful tool for these types of predators to help spread these types of harassment.
Why are you downplaying this?
Not downplaying anything - I’m saying frats are, and have been, an accepted scourge on college campuses forever, and where fratboys and jocks congregate there will be oppression and/or violence against women at least. Usually racism too, but that’s slightly more variable.
Yes, as with everything else social media has made it unfathomably worse, but this isn’t unexpected. Just because they’ve found a novel and more efficient way to be shitheads to everyone doesn’t mean they weren’t before Xitter. They most assuredly were.
One can’t be surprised about this any more than one can be surprised that a baby shot themselves after finding a gun. It happens more now, and we hear about it more now, but it was an inevitable result. Should something be done? Well - yeah. Something should have been done fifty years - 100 years ago.
Why is it inevitable that young women will be harassed and terrorized by men?
Why can’t we say something about this? Why can’t we work to stop this?
Why? Because parents do the best they can and many are not very good. Because many social institutions tend to treat young men as a powerful force to be wielded, and that’s about it. Because football, trucks, meat, and alcohol define so many places. Because we have nothing transcendental to believe in together as a society.
We can and are doing something about this but the root of this story is exactly what I first said. Nothing new under the sun. Where did all these ICE assholes come from? A Venn diagram would overlap considerably with frats and jocks, i’m sure. Patriarchy is a bitch.
What do you think it does to shrug your shoulders and say “it’s always been like this”?
Whose shrugging? I’m agreeing!
THIS IS A VERY GOOD ARTICLE AND AN IMPORTANT ISSUE FOR EVERYONE.
Because they all fail upwards and end up running the world. It’s a cycle