Activism
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January 29, 2026
A video documenting an alleged gang rape in Florida drew a flood of harassment, threats, and doxxing
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(Matt Cardy / Getty Images)
In November, a University of Florida scholar, Maddie Kowalski, was allegedly gang raped whereas intoxicated at a fraternity gathering. The alleged assault was recorded with out her consent and circulated at each the University of Florida and Florida State University on YikYak, an nameless discussion board with devoted pages unique to school campuses. Within days, the footage went viral throughout mainstream social media platforms—the place customers derided the sufferer, ignored the horrifying context of the video, and turned freeze-frame pictures of the assault on Kowalski into sensationalized memes. Malicious Web customers additionally doxed members of Kowalski’s household, releasing their private info into the world to be exploited by different unhealthy actors on the Web.
On December 19, Kowalski posted a sequence of movies on Instagram, drawing tens of hundreds of thousands of views. In these posts, she sought to revive very important context and background to the trauma of her abuse—describing the circumstances of the assault, detailing her inebriated state, and emphasizing that it wasn’t potential for her to consent to intercourse. Almost instantly, her remark sections had been flooded with a disturbingly coordinated sample of harassment. Fraternity-affiliated accounts tagged fellow brothers and different digital onlookers, joking concerning the variety of alleged assailants, and volunteering to hitch the mob.
Other commenters continued focusing on members of Kowalski’s household. Gossip columnist Marukho Pfozhe launched a tabloid-style piece in The Sports Grail publicizing details about them—together with the LinkedIn account for Kowalski’s father, together with a sequence of crude memes about her household. A gag account, @Therealjohnhog, wrote in a tweet attacking each her dad and mom, “Just received a call informing me that Maddie Kowalski’s mom was in DZ at UF. And I swear to god her nickname was the ‘easy DZ.’ Someone please keep an eye on [Mr.] Kowalski.”
The profiles of many of those commenters revealed that they weren’t nameless, non permanent customers shielding their identities behind “burner accounts” to harass Kowalski with impunity. Their feedback had been tagged with their full names on show, collectively in lots of circumstances with their college and fraternity affiliations. They left sexually suggestive feedback like “me next,” and tagged one other man to recommend that they need to have interaction in group intercourse, making sport of Kowalski’s victimization by the hands of a predatory frat mob. The rising refrain of harassers ranged from fellow fraternity members to youthful brothers. For them, the footage documenting a mass sexual assault was fodder for extra abusive misogynist rhetoric—and vile jokes shared hundreds of instances amongst their peer group.
This isn’t the primary time that Florida-based fraternities fomented a digital dog-pile following a lady’s claims of abuse. In December 2012, Erica Kinsman, a Florida State University scholar and member of the Delta Zeta sorority on campus, alleged that she was drugged, transported to an condo, and raped by one other scholar. Her alleged assailant was later recognized as FSU’s star quarterback Jameis Winston, who would go on to win the 2013 Heisman trophy and be the number-one choose within the 2015 NFL draft. Football followers revered Winston, who has since been accused of sexually assaulting an Arizona Uber driver in 2016.
Florida State fraternities had been early and vocal defenders of Winston. In the wake of Kinsman’s prices, a reporter for Tampa Bay Times surveyed the robust pro-Winston sentiments on the college’s Greek Row: “On College Avenue, standing in front of fraternities three hours before kickoff, male students…were unified in their support.” Just a month after Kinsman’s alleged assault, a viral video featured Winston tossing footballs on the college’s Pi Kappa Alpha chapter.
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As Kinsman’s case awaited administration consideration on the college, she turned the topic of persistent memes and jeers on X (then Twitter). One consumer, @steevesauce, wrote in a sequence of malicious posts, “What does #EricaKinsman Dad feel like right now?”—anticipating the torrent of assaults that Kowalski’s household would later face. Vicious taunts like these prolong the perverse logic of victim-blaming to the survivor’s wider household, implying that her dad and mom raised a sexually licentious youngster who’s in the end liable for her personal assault.
For Kinsman, this sample of abuse festered over many months. FSU selected to delay Winston’s Title IX listening to addressing Kinsman’s prices for practically two years—a tactic that allowed him to proceed taking part in for the FSU soccer staff, in defiance of the Department of Education’s suggestions on the time that any accusation of sexual violence be investigated and resolved inside 60 days. In 2014, Winston was discovered “not responsible.”
In Kinsman’s case, the college wound up not directly abetting the concerted on-line abuse of an alleged sexual assault sufferer by dragging out an investigation; in Kowalski’s, the fraternity system so integral to social life at main state universities performed a direct and poisonous position in denigrating the sufferer. But each episodes underline a broader structural impediment for claims of abuse to obtain the intense and sustained listening to they need to advantage on the establishments the place the abuse has occurred: Networks of official neglect and peer-orchestrated escalations of abuse work in lots of circumstances to dismiss, downplay, and discredit the stories of survivors.
Kowalski’s case is emblematic of how the expertise of a solitary sufferer was swamped with malicious commentary from a nationwide social system devised to hide wrongs dedicated by folks in and round its ingroup. Fraternities are dense, loyalty-driven networks constructed on guarantees of exclusivity and mutual safety. Long earlier than social media, fraternity chapters cultivated an inner tradition of secrecy and silence that has labored to defend members from accountability when hurt is called.
Digital platforms will not be liable for creating this dynamic, however they’ve vastly accelerated the abusive conduct it generates. Today, in-group pleasure is repeatedly bolstered on-line by means of small acts of illustration: Greek letters listed in bios and ritualized posts celebrating “brothers” or “sweethearts” of the week. These are innocuous on-line badges of belonging, however the ethos behind them may be readily weaponized towards critics, accusers, or anybody perceived as a risk to the Greek world’s jealously guarded sense of cohesion.
The fiercely tribal solid of campus fraternity life predates the rise of social media by at the very least a century. In 1914, stories documented the far-reaching affect of what turned generally known as the Alabama Machine—a coalition of University of Alabama fraternities that leveraged its energy to form the college’s scholar authorities and the outcomes of Tuscaloosa college board elections.
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More generally, although, the ability and exclusivity of Greek establishments on campus goal particular person girls who might hurt the reputations and authorized standing of fraternities the place alleged assaults occurred. This conduct is so normalized that some fraternities are colloquially referred to by nicknames like “Sexual Assault Expected” (Sigma Alpha Epilson), “Pike Spike” (Pi Kappa Alpha), or “The Rape Factory” (Psi Upsilon).
In some ways, this reflexive protection of male sexual impunity has furnished the template for a misogynist tradition of digital abuse that has steadily gained momentum over the previous 20 years. Well earlier than phrases like “cancel culture” entered the mainstream, girls talking out towards patterns of abuse on-line discovered themselves subjected to coordinated, sexualized abuse on-line.
In 2008, Anna Mayer, a younger lady making ready to matriculate to graduate college, watched her pseudonymous weblog documenting her struggles with weight stripped of all anonymity; her inbox was flooded with messages from nameless customers, calling her a “stupid, ugly, fat whore.” The abuse rapidly escalated. Mayer’s on-line harassers messaged her that they’d obtained her residence tackle and leaked her private info, and issued threats of rape and sexual violence. Over the subsequent yr, troll-created webpages emerged in droves with names like “Anna Mayer’s Fat Ass Chronicles” and “Anna Mayer Keeps Ho’Ing It Up.”
Mayer’s expertise was an early occasion of the type of coordinated abuse that turned infamous within the 2014 Gamergate scandal. In that digital pile-on, feminine sport designer Zoe Quinn, who had criticized the misogynist content material favored by the gaming trade, confronted a torrent of cyber-attacks beneath the guise of loyalty to a “wronged” ex-boyfriend. As in Mayer’s expertise, the meant lesson of Quinn’s therapy was unmistakable: distinguished voices who dared dissent from the prevailing misogyny of on-line discourse could be met with ugly and unrelenting campaigns of collective punishment, as much as and together with the discharge of delicate info to on-line mobs vowing to wreak chaos, sexual assault, and worse on the audio system in query.
Even fame and wealth afford no protections towards this gendered tradition of drive-by digital assault—as Johnny Depp’s ex-wife Amber Heard realized to her misery in 2022. Depp sued Heard for defamation in a Virginia courtroom after she had printed an op-ed in The Washington Post that referenced her expertise of abuse with out explicitly naming Depp as her abuser. The ensuing international on-line spectacle resembled nothing a lot because the fraternity-based tradition of collective punishment on steroids. Millions took to social media to misrepresent proof, distort Heard’s testimony, and scale back each her allegations and personhood into monetizable memes. Just as we’ve seen with Kowalski in real-time, a lady’s account of hurt turned fodder for leisure and crude, unempirical assaults on her character, whereas her credibility turned collateral injury.
What’s totally different about Kowalski’s expertise is primarily the pace and pressure that now propel on-line abuse campaigns ahead. And with platforms akin to Elon Musk’s X functioning as accelerants of all method of sexual victimization, the type of vindictive abuse that had previously discovered traction on extra marginal dialogue boards akin to 4Chan and Reddit has now gone mainstream.
TikTookay, which is the platform of selection for youthful commentators like those behind the Kowalski pile-on, operates on a heightened model of the usual social-media algorithm that prioritizes consumer engagement over every part else. On TikTookay, each like, remark, share, or accomplished view is logged—after which determines the content material throughout every consumer’s private feed. The extra the algorithm is aware of about you, the extra exactly it may well tailor content material, the longer it may well preserve you scrolling, and the extra alternatives it creates to monetize your display time by means of promoting.
One tactic central to this course of on short-form video platforms like TikTookay and YikYak is using serendipity—i.e., the introduction of provocative content material that seeks to additional mine engagement for titillation and revenue. It’s now frequent for customers who’re a couple of minutes right into a typical scroll on TikTookay, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts to come across a video that makes them double-check that they’re logged in to the right account. The content material feels wildly off-base compared to the remainder of customers’ fastidiously curated timelines, as if the algorithm has made an apparent mistake. It hasn’t. It is testing whether or not this new subject may maintain their consideration simply lengthy sufficient to maintain them scrolling additional—and supplying further knowledge for his or her feeds to use.
Now think about you’ve posted a video outlining the story of your assault on social media, and that video has serendipitously landed on the timelines of customers who’ve been conditioned to unleash outrageous feedback on vetted streams of content material that tag their fraternity brothers, who pile on with express threats of rape. There is not any try at anonymity, no canine whistle from a burner account—solely open cruelty, normalized and amplified by means of the pervasive social mandate to dismiss hurt inflicted on girls.
It’s true, in fact, that particular person customers are liable for their very own reactions and responses. However, it’s unimaginable to miss the broader sample at work right here: a web based escalation of age-old fraternity-based patterns of expansive male complicity within the abuse of ladies who identify the harms they’ve suffered. A sample of discourse that’s served repeatedly to allow the poisonous and threat-fueled backlashes towards Kowalski, Heard, Kinsman, Quinn, and Mayer is something however random. To start the exhausting work of dismantling this type of deeply ingrained—certainly ritualistic—abuse, we have to clearly determine the methods that exploit and profit from it.
The methods at fault right here—Greek societies, universities, and the legislation—routinely decline to intervene and forestall future hurt. We are likely to group these non-responses beneath the heading of “institutional failure”—the trouble to defend an establishment’s status on the expense of somebody who has been victimized inside it. But this reflex confines us to scrutinizing establishments’ efficiency on a case-by-case foundation, leaving the underlying patterns intact and able to be unleashed on the subsequent defenseless sufferer. We encounter an identical label ascribed to fraternity males: “toxic masculinity,” which means that particular person unhealthy actors are accountable, versus a much more deeply rooted fraternity tradition of exclusivity, collective protection, and impunity. These phrases have produced no internet constructive or sustained change.
Instead of telling these methods and younger males that they’re “failures” or “toxic,” we suggest a brand new method: inform them what they need to aspire to change into. Let them know why survivors ought to matter to them, and make them conscious of what number of survivors exist quietly inside their administrative and social circles. The problem posed by the weaponized on-line tradition of misogyny and rape threats is to transcend the grim logic of algorithmic fantasies of sexualized violence and to seek out real inspiration in affirming the humanity of ladies.
Anfisa Blyumina
Anfisa Blyumina is a social justice advocate and cofounder of Temple Immigration Rights Advocates at their alma mater, Temple University.
Ray Epstein
Ray Epstein is a 2024 Truman Scholar, the youth and applications coordinator for I Have the Right To, the Pennsylvania state director of the Every Voice Coalition, and the founding father of Student Activists Against Sexual Assault at her alma mater, Temple University.
Jean Qian
Jean Qian is a legislation scholar at Georgetown University and former president of Sexual Assault Peer Advocates and Title IX scholar adviser at her alma mater, Emory University.
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