According to experts, archived materials available for public use are easily collected by fraudsters using automated programs. This makes such images and videos particularly attractive to wrongdoers, as they do not contain modern digital markers that usually help in identifying forgeries. As a result, plausible compromising materials emerge, including intimate images created based on the appearance of people from the past.
Alexander Parkin, head of research projects at VisionLabs, noted that it is sufficient to automatically gather open data from social networks to create deepfakes. Parsing systems allow for the quick preparation of source material for such forgeries.
Igor Bederov, founder of the company "Internet Investigation," emphasized that the problem with deepfakes has already reached a mass scale. According to his estimates, one in ten Russians has encountered attempts at fraud related to such technologies. If access to archived photos and videos remains unrestricted, the number of such crimes could increase by 5 to 10 times in the coming months.
It is worth noting that at the beginning of 2026, a new nostalgia trend emerged on social networks under the slogan "2026 is the new 2016." Users are actively sharing photos from a decade ago, reminiscing about a simpler and calmer time. In the first week of January, interest in the word "2016" on TikTok increased by 452%, and posts with the hashtag #2016 reached 1.7 million. On Instagram, owned by Meta, which is recognized as extremist and banned in Russia, there were over 37 million posts inspired by the visual style of the mid-2010s.
