Brands like Crocs and Birkenstock enjoyed record-breaking popularity, often featuring "jibbitz" or shearling linings.

Alexandra "Alex" Thompson, a 25-year-old social media influencer with a growing following.

spoke out powerfully about being a victim of the September 2021 leaks. She described the moment she found out as terrifying: "I froze. I was mortified, terrified. ... I felt I had given so much of myself, but I had saved a little bit for myself and for my husband, and they had taken that from me". She strongly rejected the narrative that she had done anything wrong: "I didn't do anything wrong—no matter what people describe to me, 'It's your fault, you're stupid to take nude photos, that's what happens when you're a celebrity'—all this nonsense, … they're criminals".

Reddit, which had served as a "main outlet" for linking to hacked celebrity photos during the original Fappening in 2014, took more aggressive steps to ban related subreddits. At the same time, the rise of subscription platforms like offered a new legal and consensual avenue for celebrities like Renee Olstead to reclaim their own narratives and profit from their own content, directly subverting the non-consensual leak model of the past. This also created new vectors for leaks, as seen when Love Island 2021 contestant Shannon Singh reportedly deleted her OnlyFans account after discovering users were trying to leak her photos.

Beyond individual account hacking, 2021 also witnessed a new kind of violation targeting the . That April, a massive leak involved the explicit photos and videos of hundreds of stars from the platform, including notable figures like actress Bella Thorne and rapper Bhad Bhabie. It was reported that a single Google Drive folder link, containing over 10GB of videos and pictures of 279 separate performers, was shared on a hacker forum. The platform, OnlyFans, was quick to deny that its security had been breached, stating that "there is a group of people purchasing, compiling and then illegally hosting content". In essence, it appeared that subscribers were paying for access to content and then redistributing it without permission.

Additionally, victims and their legal teams increasingly turned to private investigators and forensic analysts to trace the leaks back to their source. The rise of platforms like StopNCII.org, a tool launched with Meta's support to allow victims to generate a "hash" of an image, enabling platforms to automatically detect and block its re-upload.