Illustrations by Ibrahim Rayintakath
By and Margi Murphy
New Year's Eve. Levittown, New York. Word travels swiftly as one young woman tells the next: ' You're on the website.' Dozens of recent high-school graduates are finding out that their photos have been scraped from their social media accounts, manipulated and posted to a porn website.
Who would have done this? And can the women get the images taken down? Told there isn't much the police or anyone else can do, they set out to catch whoever did this.
Along the way, they get some help from a global band of investigators and hackers who could take risks that police and prosecutors sometimes couldn't.
Levittown is a real-life horror story for the AI generation. In this six-part series from Bloomberg, Kaleidoscope and iHeartPodcasts, reporters Olivia Carville and Margi Murphy take listeners from quiet suburbs of New York to as far as New Zealand and into the darkest corners of the Internet. Where tech moves faster than the law, and it's up to everyday people to hold back a rising tide of explicit deepfakes.
Episode 1
Me…But Not Me
Stuck in her childhood home during the pandemic, Kayla is shocked to learn that photos of her, altered to make her look naked, are posted to a website where men swap violent fantasies about women. A conversation with police leaves Kayla discouraged.
Episode 2
'I'm Also on the Website'
Months after Kayla's discovery, dozens of women in Levittown, a New York suburb on Long Island, learn they, too, are subjects of faked porn. Most are recent graduates of the local high school, and they zero in on a culprit. One of them sets out to prove it.
Episode 3
The Hunter
It's not just Levittown. The website hosting the doctored photos is the nexus of campaigns to harass women across the world. A victim in New Zealand helps to spark a global battle against the site and its elusive owner.
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