Lily Minh Wass
Editor’s note: This week’s Dispatch includes mentions of sexual assault and intimate image abuse.
This September, independent student newspaper The Cornell Daily Sun broke news of a civil lawsuit brought forth by Jane Doe—a former student who dropped out following her alleged rape and assault by seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity in 2024. The story galvanized a nation of Jane Does, where one in four undergraduate women experience sexual assault after starting college. At Cornell University, that number recently rose to one in three.
Survivors and allies took to social media, decrying how universities and legal systems have failed female student bodies for generations. But these same platforms were already rife with antifeminist groups, connected by a digital architecture that tends to favor outrage and intimidation.
These male-exclusive spaces, whether in-person or online, share allegiance to a common myth: Masculinity, in the singular, weaponized definition, is under attack.
This myth shaped American fraternities into the institutions we know today. The original fraternities of the early 1800s more closely resembled literary and debating societies, where students sought academic freedom outside their formal curriculum. As the turn of the twentieth century approached, affluent white men found themselves joined by women, the working-class, and racial minorities on campus, upending the exclusivity of educational institutions. Fraternities began shifting from their original intellectual focus to the preservation of male privilege, where hazing, the objectification of women, and secrecy formed the bond of brotherhood. The earliest recorded college hazing death took place at Cornell University in 1873, just three years after the university admitted its first female student.
A century later, the myth of embattled masculinity resurged within the manosphere, an umbrella term for misogynistic communities online. “Red-pilled” users make reference to The Matrix to assert their belief in a “simulation” in which feminism systematically oppresses contemporary men. The rest of the world is said to remain “blue-pilled”—ignorant of the truth. In both centuries, qualms with the changing present have been used to create a nostalgia for an idealized past premised on patriarchy and bigotry. By building an insular, self-affirming ecosystem, grievance by grievance, these spaces also mobilize sufficient influence to impose their unreality on the rest of us.
In a widely publicized image from Jane Doe’s lawsuit, the accused are seen inviting fifty-seven fraternity brothers in their Snapchat group chat to participate in the rape. The secrecy of this exchange was protected by Snapchat’s ephemerality, which erases unsaved texts after twenty-four hours, and the fraternity’s code of silence. None of the fifty- seven brothers who received these messages intervened on Jane Doe’s behalf. After defendant Jonathan Newell advertised “free p—sy” to the chat, defendant Scott Kretzschmar responded, “first person POV not a bit,” likely in reference to a style of online pornography.
The defendants’ use of Snapchat is a prime example of what differentiates campus rape in the twenty-first century from its long-enduring precedent. Beyond the physical encounter of sexual assault, victims now face digital harms through the circulation of non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII), “dogpiling” and doxxing, and the use of generative artificial intelligence for prolonged harassment.
When details of Jane Doe’s case went public two years after the alleged incident, right- wing influencers quickly sought to unmask her identity. A name that began circulating received so much attention that Instagram automatically labeled it a “popular” search term. Jane Doe has since dealt with nonstop threats, including swatting—a false call made to the police with the intention of leading SWAT teams to storm her family’s home. These mobilized extremists are continuing the online violence that first began in the Chi Phi Snapchat group on the night of Jane Doe’s assault. They’re aided by a web of anonymous networks to continuously harass victims like Doe.
A prime example of these communities is the Burnerverse on X. On the surface, the Burnerverse is a site where X users convene to discuss university sports teams. Yet some of these “burner” accounts also take advantage of anonymity and Elon Musk’s lax content moderation policies to harass young women on college campuses. As a freshman at the University of Florida, Maddie Kowalski learned that X users had uploaded NCII and videos of her that quickly surpassed 8.5 million views. Kowalski told Wired that she had not consented to any of the acts in the footage circulating online, let alone to them being
filmed and posted.
Some of the X users amplifying this content were her classmates. Others were completely unaffiliated men. A year after the incident, searching her name on X, Google, and Instagram still brings up autocomplete suggestions for NCII of Kowalski. These are digital traces of the hidden, decentralized network that made her assault go viral, infecting enough corners of the internet to never disappear.
The problem is not limited to X’s platform, college students, or even the United States. This same year has also brought horrifying revelations from CNN’s investigation into an “online rape academy”: Men around the world drugging and assaulting their unconscious partners, then uploading videos and tips to Telegram. What has remained consistent is the
digital platforms’ willingness to lend their services to these crimes, amplifying and profiting from harmful content when it emerges.
Meta, X, and YouTube have all been found to run ads for explicit deepfake services, including depictions of child sexual abuse material (CSAM). YouTube alone directed 1.82 million visits to “nudify” sites between December 2025 and March 2026.
These same algorithms have brought misogynist forums from the fringes of the internet to the epicenter. Researchers at Dublin City University used blank smartphones to set up social media accounts, posing as teenagers, and then searched for “gender-normative” male content, like sports and video games. Within twenty-six minutes, their TikTok and YouTube accounts were flooded with toxic and manosphere posts. At the same time, women’s health organizations are sounding the alarm over the suppression of sexual and reproductive health information online. Creators report being removed and shadowbanned for posts containing terms like “vagina,” “pregnancy,” and “endometriosis.”
When pressed for answers as to why women’s health gets censored while harassment, NCII, and CSAM filter through, social media companies have been quick to place responsibility on AI-driven content moderation. Meta has said it intends to replace 90 percent of its content review staff with automation by the end of this year. The company’s own chatbot has been found to obstruct access to information about abortion and other reproductive health issues, while alternatives like ChatGPT and Claude have returned misinformation and anti-abortion sources on the same topics. It’s an alarming red flag regarding who these algorithms work for and against.
These same companies reap vast economic benefits from generative models trained on the public’s thoughts and images, even when data collection may infringe on copyrights and expectations of privacy. They now profit from the advertising of and engagement with misogyny. When platforms sidestep responsibility, they frame this exploitative structure as the only way forward. To benefit from the promise of the internet, we are told to give up our consent, privacy, and safety—some of us more than others.
This framing is eerily reminiscent of what women have always heard: Your suffering is but a necessary price to pay. Girls and women shoulder this burden to attend university, to pursue a career, to use the internet. For Jane Does all over the world and the web, this cannot be the only way.
Lily Minh Wass is a public health researcher, independent journalist, and creative writer. She has held positions at Cornell University, CUNY School of Public Health, and The Vaccine Confidence Project. Her work explores the psychology of disinformation and the algorithmic spread of ideas, which she writes about for Repro Uncensored.
This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kiley Eriksen.