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The same anonymous account reposted a nonconsensual video a day after X took it down
Wired's account of Maddie Kowalski's case traces one video across Snapchat, YikYak, group texts and X inside a single afternoon. The one enforcement step it records, a post removal, did not stop the same handle publishing again.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- Wired reports that around 6pm on November 2, 2025, an anonymous X account using the handle @SteveCumfull posted a video of Maddie Kowalski, then a 19-year-old University of Florida sophomore.
- Before it reached X, the material was circulating on Snapchat at Florida State and being discussed in what looked like hundreds of messages on the anonymous campus app YikYak.
- X removed the post, the same account published the video again late the next day, and it then posted a screenshot of a cryptocurrency token bearing her name with a market cap of $11,400.
- Anonymous accounts posted her father's LinkedIn profile and his golf handicap and called her parents through the night, and one man played a call to her father live on X's Spaces feature.
Compiled by The Product DeskSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- constraint Enforcement scoped to one URL cannot contain a file already copied into Snapchat and group chats, whatever a platform's policy on nonconsensual imagery says.
- cost The discovery and re-reporting work lands on the person in the video, in the hours she is least equipped to do it, because the alert reached her socially before any queue.
- exposure An anonymous campus app identifies a target by sorority letters to the audience that already knows her, which is the audience least likely to file a report.
- precedent Attaching a victim's name to a tradeable token moves part of the abuse onto a surface no trust-and-safety queue covers, and it hands the next account a template.
Kowalski went to the house that Sunday afternoon to drop off a present, an action figure from the manga One Piece that she had picked up on a summer trip to Japan [1]. The men who lived there were her closest friends. "It was a safe space, I thought," she told Wired [2]. The chapter had a hazing investigation open against it at the time [3].
The first she heard of it was from a friend [4]. She opened YikYak, the anonymous campus app, and scrolled through what looked like hundreds of posts about a "DZ" girl [6]. When she opened the app, she told Wired, "that's when I started crashing out" [5].
A reporting flow assumes the person finds the item on the platform that hosts it and files there. This material moved on Snapchat and in group texts, got discussed on an anonymous campus network, and was published under a handle on X [7][8]. Four surfaces carried either the file or the talk about it, and a takedown on one left the other three alone [2].
X took the post down [9]. Late the next day the same handle published the video again [10]. Wired puts the first post at around 6 that evening, so roughly a day separates the two publications, with the enforcement action somewhere inside it [1].
The file was assembled before it was published. Wired describes three clips: one recorded at the frat house earlier that fall, two from a separate October encounter with two men Kowalski says she met while walking home after a night out drinking [11]. Footage from two occasions at two locations was pooled and cut into one video [3]. She says she did not consent to being filmed, let alone to the content being shared publicly [12]. The post that carried it named her and her sorority [8].
After the repost came a screenshot of a cryptocurrency token with her name on it. "Put your children's college savings into this," the account tweeted [13]. Another user posted bets on whether she would start an OnlyFans or kill herself by the end of the week [16]. She called her best friend, Lexie Blake, then a sophomore at the University of Mississippi. Blake said Kowalski "wasn't even really saying words." "She was just sobbing, hysterical," Blake said [17].
Wired's headline calls the participants a network of anonymous men [18]. The reporting documents many of them converging on one person inside about a day. It does not establish who coordinated with whom, and for anyone running a reporting queue the difference matters less than it sounds. A crowd and a conspiracy produce the same input: the same file uploaded again from accounts nobody can link to each other.
The test is cheap to run before your next release. In staging, a team can take a reported item down, upload the identical file from the same account, and see whether anything catches it without a second human report. Then the same file from a fresh account. What that gives you is the interval from first report to first block on the file, instead of a count of posts removed per week. If the second upload lands, the person who reported the first one is your detection layer, and in this case she was 19 [19].
What to watch
- Whether X suspends the @SteveCumfull account or keeps acting on individual posts; the Wired account records one post removal followed by a repost.
- Whether Snapchat or YikYak describe how the material spread at UF and FSU before it reached X.
- Whether the University of Florida or Phi Delta Theta take action at the chapter already under a hazing investigation.