A quick note before we start that this series explores sexualized imagery involving miners and violence.

Please take care when listening.

Hey, I'm Olivia Carvill and I'm Maggie Murphy.

We're the hosts of Levettown, a podcast series that explored the explosion of deep fake pornography in US high schools, and we're back in the studio for an update episode.

We're here to tell you about a long awaited crackdown on deep fake pawn and to hear from parents who have dealt with this kind of cyber harassment firsthand.

One is the mother of a victim, the other is the mother of a perpetrator.

But first the news.

The President sat to sign the bipartisan Take It Down at which would help combat, say actually explosit online materials sometimes generated by ai.

US lawmakers have passed the Take It Down Act, the first federal legislation to lay out away for teens and young women to get non consensual pornography scrubbed of social media.

The legislation also criminalizes publishing, or even threatening to publish revenge porn or deep fake images.

Today, it's my honor to officially sign the Take It Down Act into law, this big thing, very important, so horrible.

If you've already listened to the series, you'll know that things played out in Levittown the way they did largely because there was no law on the books at the state or federal level to address deep fake porn.

The new federal law has its fans and its critics, and if you want to hear more about specifically what's in it, you can listen to a previous episode.

But this episode, we're going to hear from a parent whose daughter was involved in wishing for this legislation after deep faked images of her were shared at her school.

And we're also going to hear from another parent, one whose child has been on the opposite side of this harassment and who has harmed others.

It's every parent's nightmare to think that their child could be a victim of deep fake pornography, of a long, intimidating campaign of cyber harassment.

But what if you learned that your child was a perpetrator of a crime like this, That the child you nurtured and cared for not only created non consensual pornographic images of girls they knew from school, but they continue to harass them over the course of several years, all while hiding their identity online.

What if you found out this was happening only when the police knocked on your door with a search warrant.

I hid a glimpse of something that was absolutely horrible.

In if it wasn't for the fake my son was involved, I still wouldn't even know about it.

And parents need to know.

You know, this needs to get sorted out.

This is the mother of a young man who was accused of the kind of online harassment we covered in our series.

She wanted to remain anonymous because she feared speaking out publicly could impact her career in safety.

So we've agreed not to identify her or her son and will refer to her using a pseudonym, Barbara.

She went through a lot with her son, and she said she thought it might help others to hear about it.

Barbara says that when her son was young, she thought that she was lucky to have a happy child who was pretty adaptable pre puberty.

He was literally an all round it really he loved a lot of different things.

He had a lot of my characteristics, so we related.

Well, he's quite creative, it was extremely companionable, just a lovely young boy.

But over time things changed.

He developed some mental health issues as he approached puberty, and was quite a dramatic change, very very sudden.

She noticed her son pulling away from sports, school and his social life.

To her, something knocked him off course, effectively driving him into isolation.

The serious social withdrawal started to kick in and of his depression, and.

That was difficult.

So it went from a child who was participating in things to a teenager who refused to participate in It was like black and white.

And started to have some negative comments about school as well, about his teachers or about not enjoying subjects.

It can't be bothered.

Also, a thing that I had noticed with him was that, unlike kids of my friends, he had no vision of his future.

And I saw this teenager who refused to take any opportunities and had no vision of what he wanted to do.

So there was, you know, so started to get quite worried.

I was concerned enough about it even then that I did talk to a counselor was there anything I could do.

I remember being told that because I was an awesome mother, I was a great role model and I didn't have to worry about anything.

It is really one of the things that sticks in my throat.

It's clearly things went pretty pear shaped, and I'm not going to go into the details because so I think mental health and mental illness, they don't come and neat little boxes.

Anyway, Barbara was a pretty tech savvy mum, and there were always computers in their home.

She didn't think much of her son using technology too, like playing Harry Potter video games, but as he got older, she noticed he spent more time online and he began making friends there too.

In hindsight, there were some influences that started to come into the house.

I will describe it in general terms.

So if you're a parent and you've got a son and they're having a sex life in their bedrooms, locked up with the curtains drawn, and that you can't not know that's happening.

There's signs of that.

So that had been going on for a long time.

But I thought it was consensual, you know, modern online relationships, because he told me by that time about real relationships that he believed were real.

So I was aware that he was having an online thing.

So though I wasn't expecting this other aspect, but I had warned him about things that can happen online.

You know, these are things you need to be really careful about because people can get groomed and sucked into, you know stuff.

You know.

I tried to explain to him seriously, and he's just like, fuck you go away, Mom.

What do you know?

Can you recall the moment when you learned that your son was harassing women online with doctored graphic images.

A bunch of investigators and police turned up with a search warrant.

It was might have been a week end or after work.

I was outside cleaning up with a wheelbarrow in a rake or something like that.

I locked up on it.

It's just this array of police and playing clothes investigators at my gate, and a female detective came to speak to me, show me that there was a search warrant.

Ah.

They asked if he lived here, where was he in the house.

So I guess I was shocked, but I wasn't one hundred percent surprised, because I'd been really concerned about my son with the illness, and because I knew that I didn't know what he was doing.

Can you characterize what you were told that he had been doing?

Why the police were investigating him.

That came in with a warrant and some babework.

They left it on the bench top.

I just read the front page had some charges on it, and I remember its like I think a lot of it was like online harm.

Later, because he was having difficulty dealing with the lawyers.

The lawyers are having difficulty because it's a new area.

I thought, well, I'm going to have to have a closer look here, and I'm going to have to help.

The lawyer had a massive file, and then I saw all the stuff.

All Barbara knew were the charges brought against her son.

He wasn't willing to talk then about what he'd been accused of.

We asked if he would be open to speaking to us, and he declined.

But looking at the online images the investigators had collected, this was the moment that Barbara realized what her son had been up to alone in his bedroom.

We'll be right back.

We're back with Barbara, who's taking her first look at the images that showed her what her son was doing online.

And there was all these men, all these dick pictures were just like erect Penis's water War.

Guys taking photos of themselves in front of their computer and then interacting somehow and this begang of other men and then they were talking just disgusting things about what they wanted to do to various females.

Honestly, I had no clues that there was these kind of porn sits.

To me, it seemed like a virtual, kind of a gang rate scenario.

That's how a me imediately perceived it.

Oh, my son has been groomed into this stuff for the lese like guys in their thirties forties.

Not just young boys.

These are adult men out there saying hey, you know you're one of us.

As Olivia and I learned through our reporting, there are many places for non consensual pornographers to post their creations, places where they get a boost from likes and comments from other men.

Tell us what you'd like to do to this woman, or show us a woman that we can make comments about, or whatever.

Post pictures of you.

You know, you're Jenna Talior on the computer, and I what the hell?

It's never been something that my generation.

It's just like it's just completely wouldn't even imagine it.

Barbara says she hates when she hears the police talk about lone wolves committing these kinds of crimes.

It bothers her when people suggest that the perpetrators are introverted acting alone, because that's not how she sees it.

That's a gang activity.

My son wasn't there alone.

He was getting pumped up by mass testosterone, fueled by thousands of men around the world telling him he was the greatest.

It's not just one fifteen year old inventing all of us.

She knows all about this world now, but it's not something she was aware of before her son's arrest.

And she's frustrated that the people she hired to help her son didn't flag this as a possible issue.

And I've just been through years of talking to psychologists, psychiatrists.

My son's been assessed and reassessed and reassessed and reassessed for years.

Why didn't it come up?

So I have a lot of questions about it, a lot of questions about those unknown harms.

You know, has your son been willing to talk to you about what he was accused of?

Largely No.

At the start, he just denied everything, just denied everything for a long time.

And that's when I realized the extend of the problem.

I suppose before that I really trusted him.

I thought we had a good relationship, and so I went through a period of feeling utterly betrayed and heartbroken basically for quite some time.

It's irrepearable because this goes against my entire values, you know, values, everything that I've lived in my life to support women, encourage women, back women, and stand up to bullying and all that kind of thing.

I just saw this as such some horrible monster that had come into my house without my permission.

But Barbara says over time she started to look at the situation differently.

And then I started to see him not as a criminal, but as a very vulnerable lesson, really struggling with his identity, with his social life, with his sexual development and stuff, and being just fucked into this because he didn't, you know, because of the state of his mind.

Basically he was very vulnerable to it.

I told my son this recently.

This is a problem of male behavior, and it must be solved by men.

Women aren't going to solve this problem.

Mums, Angry mums aren't going to solve the problem men that have been through it.

They're going to have to figure out how they got into it.

Look at the damage its cause to others and to themselves, and then they're going to have to figure out a solution.

I think that's the only way that that harm can be addressed.

Really.

I know you've spoken about him being up in his room and the vacuum that these groups failed for fear sung, but are there any other warding signs that you might tell parents to look out for.

Yeah, I wrote down a list of them.

So a lack of friends in the real world, the amount of time spent online, that it is an all consuming, all consuming thing, pulling the curtains in shades, locking the door as a routine procedure to set themselves up for maximum privacy, having a printer installed in the bedroom suddenly when maybe they don't need it for work.

There could be like little tiny things on their own as a one off.

You might not think anything of them, but I think it's like scigns of addiction that that world becomes more real to them, so it affects their relationships in the home.

They start to be rude, not listening to other people, that aggression that sort of like almost a hostility.

Don't come near my world.

With the evolution of technology at the moment, we're just seeing such an advance in what's available.

Even since the experience that you've described, technology has moved incredibly quickly, and images that these men in these networks were using and taking hours to alter now takes minutes.

And there's newdify apps that produce fake moods and moments.

Can you imagine your son scenario but with today's technological ease of creating that fake porn?

How do you think that would have played out?

And also how troubling do you think that this technology is just so easily available to young men all around the world right now?

So I think either these sites need to not exist, or if they do exist, so we need to restrict excess.

And I think parents have to be able to do that.

In at the moment, you can't because there's this whole kind of ethos about, oh, we're training and teaching our young people to make good choices, and so you should stand back and let them make good choices.

I just think that's utter rubbish because they can't.

They have no idea, and they don't listen to the appearance or to anybody, So you're not going to make good choices.

We can't just step back because too many of them are falling into this abyss.

It's interesting you talk about restrictions because there's a real range of parenting philosophy over how to protect young people from dangers online.

And on one side you have parents who advocate for withholding devices completely.

Then you've got others who are making rules like okay in communal areas the living room, but not the bedroom.

And then on the other end have parents who say tech is going to be here forever.

Now, you can't stop children from using it, but what we can do is just talk to them about it.

Where do you come down in that spectrum?

I definitely like just having a rule around those bedrooms.

Do not allow teenagers to set up their bedrooms as a fortress where no one can see in, no one can come in, and they sort of develop an arrogant attitude of saying that their parents don't even have the right to know what's happening in there.

I think that's a real danger one.

To me, that is one thing that I could have actually controlled that better, but I would have had to fight about It wouldn't have been easy.

So I think parents are going to have to be very strong about about this, and there's going to be a lot of pushback, so I don't think there's going to be I don't have any hope that there's going to be a quick or fast fix for it.

I think we have to really raise awareness at the moment, really really raise awareness to a lot of parents, to a lot of community leaders, and anyone involved in supporting youth in any way.

Great, Well, it's so appreciate you being so candid and sharing that, and I think a lot of people will find it incredibly enlightening and helpful.

So thank you from me as well.

I really am so happy, i will burst into tears.

So you know, I've had the world on my shoulders with dealing with this, and you know, I'm extremely grateful to take this opportunity to tell it how it is because I think it's such a problem.

After the break, obviously, the second step after calling the school, it's calling your lawyer to find out, you know, whither are your rates?

So we've been informed or no regulations, no legislation globally at that point.

So as soon as Francisca came back the day off, she told me, Mom, I want a law I need you to help me to find a law.

Of course, parents of young women have also been struggling, struggling to figure out how to prevent their daughters from falling victim to deep fake pornography and struggling with how to adequately protect them from the dangers of the digital world.

We spoke to one mother, Derota Manny, from New Jersey, whose daughter was deep fated while she was a fourteen year old at Westfield High School, and she decided to fight back.

Francesca has been confirmed to be one of many AA victims of deep fake pornography at Westfield High School in New Jersey, and ever since we have been advocating for regulation and legislation and just AI authority in general.

De Rooda Manny and her daughter were just in Washington, DC in the Rose Garden of the White House where President Donald Trump signed the Take It Down Act.

With us are several other brave Americans whose lives were rocked by online harassment, including Francesca Manny.

De Oda Manny describes herself as an entrepreneur, an educator, and now an advocate for deep fake pawn survivors.

What she's not, she says, is someone who was ever looking to get tangled up in politics.

We live very comfortable life, surrounded by two dogs, two cards.

We go for walks, we travel a lot, we hike, we kayak.

We don't need to be in CNN, or in New York Times or god knows where else.

This is not our prerogative, So that spitlight was put on us without our consent and without our knowledge.

Deeroda says that in October twenty twenty three, when Francisca was a sophomore, she learned that deep fake porn images of her were being sheered among her male classmates on Snapchat.

Francisca was one of several girls at her school who were targeted.

At first, Deoda says this came as a shock for her daughter, but that quickly turned to anger.

So, you know, immediately when she found out, she texted me, then she called me, and I know everybody expected she would be crying.

No, she was just shocked.

Multiple of girls crying on the hallways.

I mean, it was a havoc during that time in the high school, and some boys were pointing at them and making fun of and that's when she stopped and she said, you know, I shouldn't be crying.

I should be mad.

There's nothing to be said about.

I should be mad about what has happened to us girls.

De Roda was mad too, once she fully understood the gravity of what had happened when she answered that first call from her daughter that day.

She'd heard about deep fakes, but only in the political realm.

She knew that sometimes CEOs, lawmakers or celebrities had been targeted, but high school girls being undressed with AI never And.

When I said, can you please explain it to me?

What does that mean?

She said, Well, there's a technology when you can just undress girls, so you can take any picture, and with a click of a button, sometimes free, sometimes for nine niner cents, sometimes for five dollars, depending on the side, you will be able to undress that woman, girl, boy, anyone.

I mean, that sounds like a nightmare scenario for any parent.

And Deeroda, what did you decide to do next as a mother, as a parent, what did you do?

So?

When Francisca came back home that evening, she has been pissed because her school suggests that there's nothing they can do to the perpetrators, she said, well, what about the code of conduct?

You have it?

They said, well, but they're not AI lost, so we can't really apply it.

The school did have a harassment, intimidation and anti bullying policy that applied to technology, but Deoda says it was outdated, to say the least.

When Francisca brought it home, she said, look, mom, they're actually referring pagers and what was it with Alice Wachman.

She's like, what is a pager?

What is it a Wakman?

No one in authority seemed to have the right playbook to respond to what had happened at Francesca's school.

Obviously, shore with a new cord war that there would be one day suspension for one boy and that's it, and that the school is offering counseling.

So Francisca says, I don't need your counseling.

What I need is an accountability.

Their answer was there's really not much we can do because there are no laws.

Did you feel at this point that you, you Da, the other young woman who have been targeted in this case, had been kind of failed in some way one.

Hundred percent failed, disappointed, offended.

It's a very strong message that we're sending to the female community in our high school that basically says, you know you are a girl.

At some point you will wear a victim's badge, so go for counseling.

Well, screw that.

Yes, this happens, and it's our job to learn how to protect our image.

But it's also our job to point out that certain behaviors are unacceptable and should not be cultivated, especially in the place a thief a school should be.

We reached out to Westfield High School, and the school said that it can't comment on individual student matters or disciplinary actions.

In a statement, the school's superintendent, Raymond Gonzales, said the incident took place outside of the school year, but that the administration started investigating immediately in coordination with local police.

It also provided counseling support to the victims, and it revised its policies to include the use of AI and the definition of cyber bullying, and updated its code of conduct to better address emerging digital issues.

And what about for you as a parent, as a mum who watches your teenaged daughter go through this.

You know, it's interesting.

I've been asked this question over and over and I always want to respond with, well, how do you think it makes me feel?

So I'm going to leave it at that.

But what I'm going to say instead is instead of constantly asking any victim of any kind of crime of how did it make them feel, we should start asking the important questions.

One is why is this happening?

Two is what can we do to fix it?

There's also the question of what are the consequences of those images being showed?

Consequences like a college recruiter googling a prospective student and stumbling across what looks like real life nudes online, or a future boss or a future boyfriend, or really anyone for that matter.

De Rodas says she grew increasingly frustrated at people in positions of power telling her not to worry about the deep fake pornographic images of her daughter because they're not real.

To her, the problem was that deep fakes looked real.

It felt like a real crime, even if it only occurred in the online world, and even if the offline world hadn't created the laws to criminalize it.

Yet, can you talk about your own sense of realization that this lack of any kind of regulation or legislation to try and prevent this, that this wasn't just a New Jersey issue.

Your your realization that this really was a national and actually a global issue.

Yes, So the day of the incident, we already figured it out what is wrong because obviously the second step after calling the school, it's calling your lawyer to find out, you know, what.

Are your rights.

So we've been in formed of exactly the same word.

There are no regulations, no legislation globally at that point.

So as soon as Francesca came back the day off, she told me, Mom, I won a law.

I need you to help me to find the law.

So that set us into motion for advocacy.

And I did tell her, you know, I was slightly reluctant of how much of her involvement I would like to see in this advocacy.

I said, you know, you are fourteen.

You don't know how people will react if you go full force out there like you usually do.

She's a fencer, she's been fencing since she was six.

We just came back from a Junior Olympics, so she has that kind of focus when she wants something.

I said, but gan to be prepared.

Some people are going to stay on your side and some people will be really against you.

She says, I don't care.

I know I'm right.

People will think what they want to think.

I know what I want.

Franchisca and Rhoda started talking to a lot of lawmakers.

One big victory for them came in early April.

Today I stand before you as the happiest sixteen year old girl, not because the journey has been smooth, but because at fourteen, I chose not to wear a victim's badge.

Instead, I decided to fight for my rights and pursue the justice so many cold impossible.

That's Francisca.

She's introducing New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy at an event in Newark where he signed a state deep fake law that she advocated for.

Let me again begin by thanking Francesca money for her incredibly powerful words, for your bravery and for your advocacy.

We would not be here today without you.

Then came the signing of the Federal Take It Down Act in Washington, DC.

How do you feel about the legislation that has been passed.

I think it's a great step forward.

It's a beginning.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, AI technology it's so complex and multifast said and so fast piece that we will have to try to catch up with them in terms of legisla as well.

So we need to start somewhere and then we need to continue bettering what's already in the legislative realm.

That being said, I think it's also very important to point out Francisca has been nominated part of THAI one hundred AI Most Influential Group last wire, So we've been connected with one of the most amazing individuals in AI realm that are advancing climate control and education and research and medicine, you name it, and that really open our eyes.

So now we strongly believe that conversation about AI cannot be one sided.

It's a holistic conversation that should include deep fakes and ethics and legislations, but at the same time we should simultaneously educate about the great possibilities that AI provide as a tool of an advancement in their future.

For der Rote and Francisca, this year's long advocacy crusade isn't about vengeance against teenage boys.

Some parents from Westfield High School called for the police to press charges against the male students who created and shared the deep fake images, but for this mother, daughter Joo, it was about more than that.

Vengeance is not something we're looking for.

We were looking for simple This is wrong.

You're worth enough to fight for and certain things will not be tolerated.

So I think that is extremely important to talk off.

We should educate our boys, because unfortunate, it's mostly boys of how not to misuse this technology instead of educating our girls of how to protect their image.

If we want this to change and truly instigate meaningful progress, we will have to start asking where are the boys.

That's a great point and something we did delve into in our podcast series is often this conversation stems around the impact on the young woman, the victims, but there's a whole nother realm to this, which is what is going on with young men.

I wonder what would you share to the parents of young boys to try and prevent this from happening at the source, to try and guide your kids to not create deep fakes.

That's such a good question.

I would say, talk to your boys.

Yes, there are ethics in place, and there should be certain ways that we use technology in general, and we should do the right thing.

This is the wrong thing.

But at the same time, do tell them that it's a criminal offense, right now I know the law that we just signed with Governor Murphy provides up to five years of punishment in prison, which is huge.

Taken down, it's two to three years.

Still, you know, if you want choose to educate your children because it's the right thing, then teach them how to protect themselves from ending up in jail.

Yeah.

So rather than the conversation being you will upset a friend and hurt your female friends if you do this, it's you could be imprisoned for this.

And what about advice that you may have for parents who are watching their children go through this.

Support your child.

Know that there are tools like take it Down that will allow you to take the image immediately down from any website.

Know your last but most importantly, understand that there's no right and there's no wrong in the way how you should handle the situation.

Every child is different, every family is different, every incident is different.

I love that you started this conversation talking about how your daughter wanted a law and that after this happened.

The day she found out about this incident, she came to you and said, I want a law, mom, And she got it, Yes she did.

This episode is hosted and reported by Margie Murphy and me Olivia Carvell.

Jeff Grocott produced this episode and Caitlin Kenney edited.

Sound designed by Blake Maples, original composition by Steve Bone thanks to Gilda Decali, Robert Friedman and Angel Rascio.

Sage Bowman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts.

Levettown is a production of Bloomberg, Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcasts.