Introducing: Levittown

Introducing Levittown a new podcast from Bloomberg, Kaleidoscope and iHeartPodcasts.

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 iHeart Podcasts, 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. Listen on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1308-levittown-270064417/ 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Five years ago, this was a vast checkerboard at Potato
Farms on New York's Long Island.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Today this is Levittown, one of the most remarkable housing
developments ever conceived.

Speaker 1 (00:19):
Levettown, New York, America's first suburb, row after row after
row of cookie cutter homes, the picture of the American dream.
But recently, underneath the facade of perfect order, a group
of young women found themselves in an AI fueled nightmare.

Speaker 2 (00:45):
Someone was posting photos of many of the girls that
we had gone to school with. There was one picture
of me in a bathing suit, and I didn't have
a bathing suit on anymore. It was just me naked,
well not me, but me with someone else's body parts

(01:08):
that looked exactly like my own.

Speaker 3 (01:13):
Over the last few years, rapid breakthroughs and machine learning
have made it a lot easier and cheaper to make
real looking photos or videos, pretty much anything you can
think of, But innovation comes at a price.

Speaker 1 (01:28):
I felt gross. I felt like I needed to take
a shower.

Speaker 2 (01:31):
I felt like I wanted to cry, I wanted to
throw up, I wanted to scream.

Speaker 1 (01:37):
This is a story about a technology that is moving
faster than the law where everyone is a suspect, even
your neighbors.

Speaker 2 (01:46):
It was always in the back of my head, like, oh,
it's someone that I know, But how do you find
out who that someone is when you know so many
people from school, soccer, all these things.

Speaker 3 (02:02):
What we discovered in Levertown led us on a winding journey.

Speaker 2 (02:06):
I just always had in the back of my mind
that any of them could be the one.

Speaker 3 (02:13):
Through the darkest corners of the Internet, they call it
an arms race between law enforcement and technology, and it's
just we're losing.

Speaker 2 (02:22):
We are absolutely losing.

Speaker 3 (02:24):
Where online vigilantes and enterprising detectives are joining forces. If
you're given prey, you want to go and get it.

Speaker 1 (02:33):
In this story, the victims flip the script, band together
and fight back alongside some unexpected global allies. I'm Margie
Murphy and I'm Olivia Carvill.

Speaker 3 (02:49):
This is Levittown, a new podcast series from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg,
and Kaleidoscope. Listen to Levettown on Bloomberg's Big Takee podcast.
Find it on the heeartradio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts. M