Gleb Nikitin ranked among the leaders in the number of deepfakes.

      09 October 2025 11:59 Politics

      Since the beginning of 2025, the number of deepfakes on Runet has multiplied — fake videos intentionally misleading citizens and posing a social threat.

      According to the ANO "Dialog Regions", from January to September 342 unique deepfakes of this kind were identified in the Russian segment of the internet. This is 4.1 times more than in all of 2024, when 84 cases were recorded. Experts predict that by the end of 2025 the number of deepfakes will exceed last year’s figures fivefold.

      Audience reach is also growing. In the incomplete nine months of 2025, 5.9 times more copies of deepfakes were found than in all of 2024 (55,000 versus 9,300). Views of such content reached 122.5 million, 3.1 times higher than last year’s results.

      Sergey Maklakov, head of the department for countering misinformation at ANO "Dialog Regions", notes that since October 2024 the number of unique deepfakes in Russia has been increasing quarterly by roughly 1.5–2 times or more, aided, among other things, by qualitative advances in neural networks for video generation.

      Governors and other public officials are most often the targets of deepfakes — they account for 79% of all cases.

      The most such fakes (15 unique cases) were directed against Belgorod Region governor Vyacheslav Gladkov. Among the governors "leading" in the number of deepfakes are the heads of Astrakhan and Saratov oblasts, Igor Babushkin and Roman Busargin (10 recorded cases each); the heads of Ulyanovsk and Lipetsk oblasts, Alexey Russkikh and Igor Artamonov (8 each); the governors of Kaliningrad, Irkutsk and Nizhny Novgorod oblasts — Alexey Besprozvannykh, Igor Kobzev and Gleb Nikitin (7 each); as well as the head of the Republic of Dagestan, Sergey Melikov (6).

      In addition, some deepfakes were created involving officials from Belarus but distributed to a Russian audience, as well as involving well-known figures from Russia’s pop industry.

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