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 learn that their photos have been scraped from their social media accounts, manipulated and posted to a porn website. They have so many questions: Who did this? Can the images be taken down? Shouldn’t this be against the law?
In Levittown, a six-part podcast series from Bloomberg, Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcasts, reporters Olivia Carville and Margi Murphy delve into the rise of deepfake pornography and how it has been weaponized by a community of online harassers. In exclusive audio interviews, the young women in Levittown help listeners to understand the trauma of discovering this new modern horror, while expressing their empowerment at bringing a dark subject into the light.
These women quickly discover that while investigators and prosecutors share their horror over the faked images, these authorities lack state and federal legal tools to help them. And so the women set out to find their harasser and seek justice. Carville and Murphy show how the women are part of a vanguard of individuals across the world who take risks that authorities won’t, or can’t, in an effort to stem the rising tide of deepfake porn.
Levittown unspools as a mystery quest, with the reporters peeling back the layers to learn who is behind the global upsurge in nonconsensual porn. As the local investigation into the wave of deepfakes appears to stall, one of the Levittown women does her own sleuthing. She identifies a culprit — one young man who ultimately admits to harassing dozens of his high school classmates.
The reporters then turn their sights on the locus of harassment, a website where the young man posts images and invites fellow users to harass the women virtually as well as in real life. The reporters discover that an ad hoc alliance of individuals — investigators in New Zealand, shadowy dark-web hackers, an army of Redditors – have joined forces to reveal the harassment website’s operator and shut him down. Ultimately, the reporters look at how deepfake harassment has been supercharged by new AI technologies. New nudify apps make it easy and cheap to create deepfakes — billions of images and counting. As high schools across the US grapple with outbreaks of deepfakes in their schools, federal lawmakers are only now beginning to catch up, while the operators of deepfake apps remain in the shadows.
