Big Take21 Mar 2025

Levittown Episode 1: Me... But Not Me

SHOW DESCRIPTION

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.

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.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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