Are social media posts claiming that Sarah Palin, Michelle Obama, or other celebrity women wore "probably the smallest bikini In the world" real? No, that's not true: The images used in the posts were created with artificial intelligence tools and distributed on a network of fake Facebook fan pages managed from North Macedonia. These clickbait posts link to blogs filled with ads, not facts.
Among the false posts Lead Stories found is a post (archived here) making the claim about former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin shared by the "Herox" Facebook page on June 28, 2026. The caption read:
Sarah Palin, 62, Wears Probably The Smallest Bikini In The World!
⬇️ Check The Comment!
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Sun Jun 28 17:36:58 2026 UTC)
(Image source: Herox Facebook page)
This image claiming to be the 62-year-old Palin, who was the Republican vice-presidential nominee in the 2008 U.S. election, is not real. The Hive Moderation AI-Generated Content Detection tool concluded it was 99.9% "likely to be AI-generated or deepfake content."
(Image source: screenshot of hivemoderation.com/ai-generated-content-detection)
The ZeroGPT AI image detector also concluded it was fake, with 97% certainty.
(Image source: screenshot of zerogpt.com/ai-image-detector)
A reverse image search (archived here) on Google.com found an image of the same kitchen scene with another woman wearing the same dress, in a nearly identical pose, and with the same body. That image was used in a post (archived here) shared on the @MissSeiferN X account on November 13, 2025. Hive Moderation and ZeroGPT AI-content detectors also concluded that image was fake with 99.9% and 97% certainties, respectively.
(Image source: Lead Stories gif of Facebook and X images)
The fake Palin post includes a link in the top of the comments section to storynews.us, which is a blog (archived here) titled "Sarah Palin -- 40 Best Photos! Her Style Evolution Over the Years 👀". Despite the title, there are no photos of Palin on the page, just a long scroll of ads. The domain is registered to an address in Kumanovo, North Macedonia, according to whois.com data (archived here). This location is significant in the history of Facebook spam operations, which we will address later in this article.
A Facebook search (archived here) for the phrase "probably the smallest bikini in the world" found that this Macedonian network was making the same claim about at least nine women, including:
- Sarah Palin
- Michelle Obama
- Catherine Bell
- Alyssa Milano
- Jewel Kilcher
- Nigella Lawson
- Samantha Fox
- Brandi Passante
- Erica Durance
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshots of Facebook)
Meta transparency confirmed that the Facebook pages used to spread the fake posts were managed from North Macedonia.
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshots of Facebook)
The roots of this specific Macedonian network do not appear deep, since most of the pages were created only in recent months. But Lead Stories has been investigating fake content operations from that region for nearly a decade. Lead Stories published a report titled Macedonian Fake News Network Shuts Down Dozens Of Websites After Joint Investigation By Lead Stories & Nieuwscheckers in January 2019.
Lead Stories co-founder Maarten Schenk traveled there in December 2025 and wrote an analysis titled From Macedonia With Facts: A Fact Checker Goes To Skopje -- The Kumanovo Connection Revisited.
The geographic center of the social media spam industry has shifted to southeast Asia in the past year. Lead Stories and other fact checkers have identified a major source of AI-generated false stories: a single operation based in Vietnam. Recent reporting and fact checks mentioning that country are available here.
Lead Stories has published a primer -- or a prebunk -- on how to identify these kinds of fake posts exported from Vietnam. It is titled "Prebunk: Beware Of Fake Fan Pages Spreading False Stories About Your Favorite Celebrities -- How To Spot 'Viet Spam.'"
