Before clicking on wild “look now” headlines claiming Sarah Palin appeared in a tiny bikini, it’s worth slowing down, because these stories are almost always clickbait built on fake images.
For years, edited photos have circulated online to manufacture shock, most famously the image of Palin in a stars-and-stripes bikini holding a gun, which fact-checkers proved long ago was fake, created by pasting her face from a real July 4th parade photo in Chugiak, Alaska onto someone else’s body. The angle and smile fooled many people at first, but mismatched lighting, uneven skin tones, and rough edges give it away once you look closely, and the hoax even spread far enough that a national TV host had to issue an on-air apology for using the fake image.
