JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
People call it the burnerverse. It's a loosely connected online community of sports fans. But this anonymous corner of the internet doesn't just talk smack about the athletes they don't like or complain about their team's most recent losses. They have also doxed young women, making their names and nonconsensual explicit videos or images viral on platforms like X and subjecting them to online harassment. Ej Dickson is a senior cultural reporter for Wired magazine, and she recently wrote about this corner of the internet and joins me now to talk about it. Hi there.
EJ DICKSON: Hi. Thank you for having me.
SUMMERS: Thanks for being here. Ej, for people who have never heard of the burnerverse before, what is it, and where did it come from?
DICKSON: Well, it's ostensibly a community of college sports fan accounts that are anonymous. And I want to be clear, it's not representative of the whole community. There are a lot of burner accounts that are pretty innocuous, but there is a segment of the community that is pretty violently racist, misogynistic and antisemitic and that has made something of a sport out of doxing young women.
SUMMERS: You mentioned that this is a community of college sports fans. Do we have a sense of how big these burner communities are and who's actually participating in them?
DICKSON: It's hard to gauge how big it is because it's so sprawling and it's loosely connected. And every college or university that has a big sports team will have, like, its own little burner galaxy, as it were. The second part of your question - who belongs to the burnerverse? - it's pretty wide-ranging. I was shocked when I started digging into who is behind these accounts. It's men in their 20s, 30s, 40s, men who are long out of college. It really could be anybody.
SUMMERS: Your article focuses on the story of a young woman named Maddie Kowalski who found herself at the center of a burnerverse campaign. Tell us what happened to her.
DICKSON: Maddie Kowalski was a University of Florida sophomore last November when she discovered that a bunch of intimate images had been leaked nonconsensually of her. And at first, it was just within her college campus and then within the Florida college community. But then it got posted by these burner accounts and it went viral nationally.
SUMMERS: In recent years, victims of revenge porn now have more legal recourse. All 50 states now have laws that criminalize the nonconsensual distribution of intimate images. And last year, President Trump signed the TAKE IT DOWN Act into law, which made it a federal crime to knowingly share or even threaten to share intimate images, including deepfakes. But as we've been talking about, the burnerverse is mostly anonymous, so for women like Maddie Kowalski, is there actually any legal recourse in this situation because we don't know who these people are?
DICKSON: There is. Thanks to the Florida sexual cyberharassment statute, there was legal recourse for Maddie specifically. And thanks to the TAKE IT DOWN Act, there is legal recourse for a lot of these victims. But it takes time.
SUMMERS: Lots of women have been doxed online over the years for various reasons. As someone who covers the culture, what does this tell you about the ways the internet and its culture are changing?
DICKSON: I think the cultural and political climate is definitely playing a role, but there are also so many other little things contributing to this. It's the lack of regulation on platforms like X. It's the incredibly slow pace of our legal institutions, of these universities that see this happening. Like, these institutions are really not keeping pace with how fast the internet is changing, and I think this piece is a pretty harrowing demonstration of that.
SUMMERS: We've been speaking with Ej Dickson. Her investigation, titled "A College Girl Was Exploited On Camera. A Network Of Anonymous Men Got To Work," is available to read from Wired magazine. Ej, thanks for your reporting.
DICKSON: Thank you so much. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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