Is there a rising number of $2.8 million statues erected or underway to honor people like Dolly Parton, George Strait, Bruce Springsteen, Bill Clinton, Shania Twain, Jimmy Page, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Waltz King André Rieu, and others? No, that's not true: Multiple social media posts using nearly identical language and the $2.8M figure have cranked out the story to appeal to fan groups, sometimes called "stans". The accounts, managed from Vietnam and offering bogus U.S. mailing addresses, included links to made-for-advertising websites loaded with popup ads. At the time of writing, there was no credible public information verifying that the statues had been commissioned or erected.
The claims about statues originated in more than a dozen Facebook posts, including a November 3, 2025 post (archived here) on the The Beatles's-Fan page. The post opened:
A $2.8 million bronze statue dedicated to the one and only King of Country, George Strait, is set to stand tall in the heart of Austin, Texas a fitting tribute to a man whose music has defined generations.
These are images from a selection of nearly-identical posts on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshots taken on Facebook.com, arranged in collage by Lead Stories.)
The first hint they are fake is that a Google Reverse Image search for several of the images turned up no informal online photos of the statues by random social media users, even though statues like that would attract selfie-takers and tourists. The image of the George Strait statue, for instance, found multiple pictures of real Strait statues, but none of the AI fake in the post Lead Stories examined.
Using keywords to search Google News' index of thousands of news sites (archived here), Lead Stories found no mentions of $2.8 million statues to honor Dolly Parton, George Strait, Bruce Springsteen, Bill Clinton, Shania Twain, Jimmy Page, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or Waltz King André Rieu. Any one of them would have been newsworthy in the specialty press as well as in local news where such statues would have been placed. No such reporting was found.
The statue images all resemble one another's finish, lighting and photo-realistic style, which suggests the images were created by generative AI tools. And, while, as Lead Stories has observed, and CBC News reported, AI detectors are sometimes unreliable, spot-checking the images with a variety of AI detectors indicated a high likelihood the statue pictures are fake:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of assessment generated by AI detection tools at Hive Moderation.)
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of assessment generated by detection tools at wasitAI.)
Lead Stories reviewed the "About" page and "Page transparency" information on the pages, finding accounts managed from Vietnam. The Vietnam origin does not, in and of itself, prove a post is fake. But, Lead Stories has debunked many other AI-powered fake stories originating from Facebook pages managed in Vietnam and driving traffic to low-quality fly-by-night websites, which could be characterized as "made-for-advertising" or MFA sites (archived here). Those sites save money by using AI instead of human content creators and then harvest advertiser fees and social media traffic income with little investment in site content.
Here's the background information on a selection of the fake statue posts:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshots of page transparency information arranged into comparison chart by Lead Stories.)
A search across Facebook (archived here) revealed that the article's keywords, such as "$2.8 million", appear in every post, but with a different celebrity name and image, as the GIF below illustrates:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshots of fake statue announcements arranged in a gif file.)
Lead Stories looked at the Billlboard Buzzzz Facebook page, for example, finding it provided a fake address in Los Angeles (where a public elementary school sits) even though Facebook records indicate it's a page managed from Vietnam:
(Image source: Lead Stories graphic created from screenshots at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61579494921750&sk=about and https://52ndstes.lausd.org.)
Lead Stories reached out to the school to determine if it is now operating the Billlboard Buzzzz page and will update this fact check when they reply.
