Endless Thread - Introducing Levittown, new podcast from Kaleidescope and Bloomberg

Episode Date: April 8, 2025

Have you ever been deepfaked? Or maybe this is just a new fear – that photos of you end up online that are you – but not really you? What would you do? For an increasing number of people – especially women – this is becoming a reality. So much so that a recent bill in Congress called the “Take It Down” Act has found some incredibly rare bipartisan support. The bill is sponsored by republican Senator Ted Cruz and democrat Senator Amy Klobuchar – making it illegal to post explicit deepfakes – First Lady Melania Trump has also been a vocal supporter. But the thing is, it isn't law yet and… it might not be enough. A new podcast called Levittown, from Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope Podcasts, takes listeners on a sort of cyber thriller for the AI age. It's the story of a bunch of young women in the suburbs of Long Island who find naked fakes of themselves online and when told there’s nothing they can do about it – set out to catch the perpetrator. This ends up connecting them to a web of online vigilantes – and cyber criminals taking advantage of a justice system not ready for the reality of AI. Endless Thread brings you the first episode in this series. If you like what you hear – find Levittown wherever you like to get your podcasts to listen to the full series.

Support for endless thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. Hey friends. If you're a regular endless thread listener, you know from deepfakes. We've had deepfake episodes about audio, about video, about cheerleaders, about the law. And what we've learned over time while reporting on this topic is that over time being deep faked has become a threat for an increasing number of people, especially women. We want to introduce you to a new show we think our listeners would enjoy. It's called Levittown. It's from Bloomberg and kaleidoscope,

and it's a kind of cyber thriller for the age of AI. Levittown follows a bunch of young women in the suburbs of Long Island who find naked fakes of themselves online, and when told there's nothing they can do about it, set out to catch the perpetrator. This ends up connecting them to a web of online vigilantes and cybercriminals taking advantage of a justice system not ready for the reality of artificial intelligence. We're bringing you the first episode in the series, and if you like what you hear, you can find Levittown wherever you get your podcasts to listen to the full series. This series explores sexualized imagery involving minors and violence. Please take care when listening. Can we start from the beginning? How did this all start for you?

So I can go back into it. I remember somehow all these pictures from my Instagram, my Visco, were all on this website. There was one picture of me in a bathing suit. Well, it was me in a bathing suit in one of my friend's backyards. and I didn't have a bathing suit on anymore. And it was just me naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts on my body parts. It was just boobs and body parts. Completely nude. That looked so much like my own body.

There were so many different pictures. from my social media on essentially a porn website. I was just trying to figure out exactly like, where is this coming from? Like, how are they finding my stuff? I didn't let people follow me that I didn't know. So 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. Did you ever have any suspicions as to who it was back then? No. Not at all. It was always like,

why is this happening? Who is this? Taylor was 20 years old and living at home with her parents in a town that was once the picture of the American dream, a Long Island suburb called Levittown. We're driving around Levittown

a lot of white picket fences, a lot of American flags. It has the feel of going back in time. This is Levittown, one of the most remarkable housing developments ever conceived. It's the kind of America that makes you think of the 1950s. Cookie-cutter, single-family houses. Like someone hit Control C on the ideal suburban house, and then pasted it over and over. on street after street.

The idea that came to a man named Bill Leavitt was this. Why not apply to the building of houses the same principles that have brought other American industries to their un-excelled peaks of efficiency and service? Levitown was built for veterans returning from World War II as the picture of white suburbia, perfect houses, manicured lawns. Dotted here and there throughout the huge area are shopping centers where every type of product or service

is readily available. Shoes stores. Today we often talk about the future as digital. Algorithms and codes as the architecture of our lives. But back then, Levitown was the imagined future. It just feels like quite suburban and safe. You know, it feels like the kind of place that nothing really happens around here. And yet underneath the facade of perfect order,

it's here I found a story unfolding of a group of women faced with a new reality none of them wanted. A technological reality spinning out of control. It's like this is not the setting for a horror movie and that's exactly what played out. But this isn't your average horror story. The kind where a group of teens, are hunted down until there's only one left standing.

In this story, they flip the script, band together and fight back, alongside some unexpected global allies, forcing law enforcement and tech companies to sit up and take notice. From IHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg and ColliderScope, this is Levertown. I'm Olivia Carvel.

Over the summer, our producer Julia Nutter and I made the drive out to Long Island to meet Kayla at her family home. I can hear music. Hey here again. It's good to see you too. How are you feeling? I'm good. Let me just do a quick levels check. Oh, do you want me to put the bird in another room?

I didn't even hear the bird. Oh, I thought the bird. Yeah. Kayla's like a firecracker. She's small but loud with brightly colored hair. Every time I've seen her, her hair is a different thing. Her hair is a different color. She's covered in tattoos and piercings.

What kind of bird is that? A parakeet. So he likes to talk to himself a lot. Do you feel comfortable showing us where you were when you discovered the website when you were showing it? Yeah. It's a little messy. Kayla's 24 now.

When we visited her, she was living in the same house she grew up in. See all your plants. And it is great. Yes, this is, as you can tell, I love my books. In high school, Kayla was an elite athlete and a girl who moved easily between friend groups. People make it seem like there's either the popular group or, you know, so-called nerds. I would like to say I was in the middle of it because I hung out with a lot of the sports people who were considered popular. But I had my friends who we would just sit around and play video games, hang out, do funny things.

and make videos of us doing stupid little things. I say this to my friends actually all the time. I may not dress like it, but my inner person is kind of emo. I listen to a lot of dark music now. I have the tattoos all over, have piercings all over. And I truly just like, it's not like I like the color black. I just like, I changed a lot. I have a really big book tattoo on my leg.

I have a big wrap around plants because my whole leg is going to be things I love, and plants is another thing for me. This one is one of my favorites. It's Tell Me About Tomorrow. Tell Me About Tomorrow is one of my favorite songs because whenever I'm in a depressive state or just not doing good mentally, I play that song and it tells you to tell me about tomorrow. Tell me about the next day that's going to go on in your life. when I was going through this situation, I was not mentally doing good at all. And it told me you will have tomorrow and you can't have tomorrow. It sounds like a lot of the tattoos are important to you because they represent you moving forward or healing or getting over the situation as you described it.

Do you feel comfortable getting into that now? Yes. I remember being in my bed, just laying down. It was late at night. This was in March 2020 at the onset of the COVID pandemic. She'd recently graduated from high school and was stuck at home with her parents. I was in that corner. My bed was up against the wall.

I was just laying in the bed. I'm pretty sure I was on my phone, just scrolling through Instagram or something or on Snapchat. She heard her dad walking up the stairs from the living room. I can always hear when someone comes up the stairs and he knocked. He always knocks on the door. So he knocked and just like walked right in. I thought automatically like I was in trouble or something. But then I could just like tell like he was just confused.

And he was like a little hesitant to like come up to me. I could tell. And he was just like what is this? what is this? What was he showing you? I think it was the website. It was the faked picture of her naked and next to it, a poll

asking the site's users to rank what they wanted to do to her sexually. This next part is graphic and it might be difficult to hear. It was I always had trouble saying these parts.

It was drink her piss, milk her, have her drink my piss, and there was something else and I can't entirely remember what the other one was. So they were ranking

what they wanted to do to you sexually? Yes, yeah. She kept scrolling and it got worse. We would see what they posted, like their nude pictures and them jerking all, and coming on our pictures, even like pictures of our pictures with their dicks there and the ejaculation there. And then there was like some like writings of like, um, raper.

My dad was very confused. He asked me what this was and how did it get up there? and I did not know because I've never seen it before, which I obviously told him. So that's how we found out about the website. Support for this podcast comes from Nature is the Solution, a podcast from the Nature Conservancy. When it comes to the environment, it's easy to focus on doom and gloom, but that's not the whole story,

especially when there are so many projects working towards bringing people in nature together. In this moment, optimism isn't naive. It's necessary. Follow Nature is the solution wherever you listen to podcasts and discover stories of impact and possibility. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories, stories about policing or politics, country music, hockey, sex, of bugs. Regardless of whether we're. we're looking at science or not science,

we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcasts. There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice. Beautifully produced audio has the unique power to connect and inspire. Tell your organization's story with a custom podcast from City Space Productions, the creative studio from WBUR's Business Partnerships team.

Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org. slash creative studio. Kayla says her dad is a big guy, big personality like her. Loud laugh.

Back then, he was a police officer. A beat cop, really, for the Nassau County Police Department. He didn't want to talk to us for this podcast, but Kayla says he's really perfect. protective of his kids, which means he regularly Googles their names, searching the internet for anything related to them. For me specifically, I was playing soccer competitively. So when I was going to college and playing soccer then, he just got nervous. Like when they searched things, he doesn't want them to see things or wrong or, you know, like exactly what we found.

When he shows you the phone, what is the photograph on the phone that you're looking at? The specific photo that you first see. I'm almost positive. It was the one with the bikini taken off my body. And it was just me naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts on my body parts that looked exactly like my own. Was there ever a moment, even a split second moment? moment that you thought it was you naked? Yes. I definitely like at first like I was like oh my god

that's me like how did they get that but then I was like no that's in my friend's backyard like I was obviously wearing a bikini and I remember the bikini it was a blue one and it was mesh a little bit so that's why I would think it was so easy for them to completely alter the picture but I just like instantly I was like, whoa, how did they get that picture of me? Like, I never took a picture like that. It was frightening how exact it looked. The website it was on was called come onprintedpicks.com. And it encouraged its members to do exactly what that title implies.

To print out photos of girls and young women and masturbate to them. And then, to post a photo of the user's erection or ejaculation on top of that image. This is a practice they called tributing. To have to see my dad find all that and like, I don't know, like, just not understanding what's going on. I didn't even know anything was going on

and then my dad just coming in and seeing all that. It's like, nobody wants to see that, but like, to have your dad see that, that's like, not even uncomfortable. Like, that's not even a word for it, but just, like, unimaginable. I wish I could tell you that this website was tucked away in the dark web, where users needed to download a special browser or slink through some other secret cyber door. But it wasn't. It was just out in the open.

Kayla was out in the open too. Postings on the site included her real name, which is how her dad found it. Sometimes the images posted to the website were actual unaltered photos, revenge porn type stuff. But often, the original photos were taken from innocent social media posts, like Kayla's.

And then the site's users turned those images into non-consensual pornography. often with underage subjects. This type of photo manipulation was new to Kayla, but it wasn't new to me. I've been starting to see more of it. Over the past few years, I've been reporting on big tech and social media platforms,

what they're doing or not doing to prevent harm to kids, what guardrails they're putting up, to stop exactly this kind of thing from happening. And images like these were starting to mold. with shocking speed, alongside the rise of artificial intelligence. I kept hearing more and more about the dark side of this new technology, about deep fakes. Altered videos online, known as deep fakes. The rise of deep fakes.

Computer-generated videos known as deep fakes. Deep-fake videos make people appear to say things they never did or never would. It's getting harder and harder to trust our eyes and ears. When I first heard about the Levittown case, I knew the reporting was going to take me to some uncomfortable, but important places, from the rise of generative AI to the explosion of deepfakes to child sexual abuse material online.

I also knew that it was going to be really hard to find the victims and dive into this website on my own. So I'd turned to my colleague for help. Margie Murphy. She's a technology reporter at Bloomberg. At the time, I remember I was reporting on this new generative AI tool that people were using to create child sexual abuse material. I typically write about people who hide on the fringes of the internet,

like teenage hackers extorting global businesses, or cybercriminals using AI to scan people. Not that long ago, when I started on this beat, deepfakes weren't that easy to make, and kind of always had a tell. If you looked at them long enough, you would notice something was off. Yet they caught your attention. With AI, there's been so much innovation.

But in the last few years, there have been rapid breakthroughs and machine learning. Amazon investing up to $4 billion in startup anthropic. And truly hundreds of millions of dollars has flowed into image-generating software powered by AI. Microsoft, Amazon, you name it. They're all actively investing in young AI startups because... That has made it a lot cheaper and easier to make convincing photos or videos of pretty much anything you can think of. Now, there are billions upon billions of deepfake images out there.

And this probably won't surprise you. But the vast, vast majority, by one estimate more than 90% of all deepfake imagery, is pornographic. Typically, people who have had their image turned into porn have not consented to having their faces, bodies or voices morphed in this way. A lot of people don't even know that these images of themselves exist. But as Olivia and I learned, Kayla's dad had found this website in a regular search of her name.

And now he and Kayla knew it was there. Seeing what people had to say about my body as the pictures were like when I'm, what, 13, 14? I think I instantly cried. I was just like, I think I remember kind of like stating more to myself than anybody else. Like, why is this happening to me? Like, what is going on? Like, is this even real life?

I felt betrayed by my body because it felt so real. Like, the pictures just seemed so real. The website's users also encouraged each other to comment on the images and even harassed the person being pictured. It's unimaginable to think that people can even say how gross, like, to tell you to rate me or milk me. I remember a lot of mine was with my braces because I had braces until I was in 11th grade. And then I had some pimples. and I would see people saying that they loved my brace face and my pimples on my face, they like them younger.

Did you actively search through the website for all photos of you and look at other photos on there and what the people were saying? Or could you just not look at it at all? No, I constantly looked at it. I was searching to see if there were new pictures that would be uploaded. After learning about the website, Kayla's biggest question was,

who did this? Who went through the trouble of scraping her pictures from social media, editing them to make her look naked, and then posting them on this site, asking others to harass her? She wanted it to stop, so she took a break from Visco,

a photo sharing app. Because I started to notice that was the main. in place that they took my pictures from. I mean, for you, you can't unsee that. That's your body and that's someone putting it out there naked on this website. How do you survive and how do you cope? I quite literally just put it in the back of my head and moved on

and just did not think about it, tried not to think about it. We are still on lockdown. I was stuck with my thoughts a lot, but I was also stuck with my family. We all kind of just put it in the back of our heads and essentially basically pretended that it never happened. Kayla didn't tell anyone about it, not even her friends. Though her father reached out to his colleagues at the Nassau County Police Department, he wanted to know what could they do to help Kayla? My dad did seek advice to his buddies at work.

He did ask if there was anything that they could do, but his buddies really didn't know how to go about it because it's so hard to trace like those types of websites when they're all anonymous and they're essentially a porn website, so it's really hard to trace those back to the original owner or anything like that. Bear in mind, this was happening in 2020, when the term deepfakes wasn't as widespread or recognized as it is now. and there weren't any laws, federal or in New York State at this time,

to prevent faked pornographic images of real people. I didn't really know what there was to do after my dad already tried to contact the police department and his buddies and them just telling us that there really was not much that they can do going through a complaint and trying to go through all the steps that it took. I just don't think I was strong enough at that moment. And as more time passed, can you describe how your feelings about that website and those photos changed? I think after some time I stopped looking at the website, put it in the back of my head, but it completely altered the way that I thought about my body.

And there's a thing called body dysmorphia. your brain alters the way that you look at your body. And I completely went through that. I used to feel so confident about it because I was an athlete. I felt so in tune with my body. And then I completely changed. I started having eating issues and wasn't able to eat full meals. I would feel sick after eating.

I couldn't even eat three bites of food. I would eat two bites and feel absolutely disgusted in what I'm eating and disgusted in my body for wanting food. It completely changed just who I was as a person. I completely got depressed and just wasn't myself. And that's where the story could have ended with Kayla's faked pictures still online. And her and her dad not able to do anything about it.

Her small, safe, suburban world turned upside down. But 10 months later, Kayla's phone rang. I got a call when I was working at my old job at a clothing store. It was around New Year's Eve. I remember it was like 740, and I was behind the register. It was very quiet in the store. So I was just on my phone. We weren't really supposed to be on our phones,

but I just remember being on my phone. And I see one of the classmates. It was her dad's name popped up on my phone. phone, which was so weird to me because I was like, I don't even have this number. Why are they calling me? And I just remember the last name. And I answered, and I was like, hello? And she's like, hi, this is blank. She goes, I saw you on the website. I just want to let you know I'm also on this website. And I remember just like walking away from the register. And I was just like, okay, like, How many other people are on there?

Who do you think it is? And that's when she said. I figured out who it was, I think. In an instant, Kayla's story got so much bigger. From there, it would stretch beyond her bedroom, past the high school, out of Levertown, across the country and around the world. What she didn't and couldn't know,

but what Olivia and I would learn, through our investigation was that there was a global web of cyber criminals taking advantage of a plodding justice system being pursued by online vigilantes and hackers willing to take risks

the cops and prosecutors wouldn't the story took us from New York to small town New Zealand through the darkest corners of the internet back into bedrooms of mid-century homes lined up

in neat little rose. This season on Levittown. There are things you don't want to believe about your friends. You kind of think that the people in your circle are like, you put them on a pedestal. This individual was just out to ruin their lives for no reason. It was a very new type of crime where we, it was a gray area per se.

You have certain place officers that will white, calls that come in and they'll go and respond to those calls. I'm the person that will go and hunt people. They call it an arms race between law enforcement and technology. And it's just, we're losing. We are absolutely losing. This series is reported and hosted by Margie Murphy and me, Olivia Carvel, produced by Colidoscope, led by Julia Nutter, edited by Neda Toulouille Semnani,

producing by Dara Lookpot. Executive produced by Kate Osborne. Original composition and mixing by Steve Bone. Levittown archival clips provided by screen ocean clips and footage. Our Bloomberg editors are Caitlin Kenny and Jeff Grokopf. Additional reporting by Samantha Stewart. Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's executive producer and head of podcasting. Kristen Powers is our senior executive editor.

From IHeart, our executive producers are tied to Levitown, Levitown is a production of Bloomberg, Collideroscope and IHeart Podcasts. If you liked this show, give us a follow and tell your friends.