Hoax posts still rife on Facebook 18 months on from Full Fact’s investigation

Our work fact checking misleading content on social media in February showed that the problem of hoax posts swamping local Facebook groups, which Full Fact exposed in a major investigation back in August 2023, hasn’t gone away.

Last month, we wrote nine fact checks about posts shared in community groups across the UK which appeared to be genuine appeals for help from, or warnings to, the public, but were actually bogus.

Full Fact specialist journalist Tony Thompson, who has been exploring this issue in-depth for years, highlighted how these kinds of hoax posts work on the BBC consumer programme Rip Off Britain last November.

📺 Full Fact journalist Tony Thompson appeared on Rip Off Britain this week to tackle the issue of Facebook hoax posts—something he’s explored in-depth.

✍️ Check out his investigation here: https://t.co/uqRJ9dzuB7 pic.twitter.com/7Il0burWek

— Full Fact (@FullFact) December 1, 2024

Our 2023 investigation found hoax posts were inundating community Facebook groups across the UK with stories about alarming events supposedly taking place in the local area.

We found that once hoax posts had generated engagement, the author would often edit the post, changing it into something completely different, such as a survey, property listing or advert for a cashback site, sometimes using affiliate links. Comments are frequently disabled on such posts, to stop other Facebook users warning people about the hoaxes.

Often hoax posts make emotive appeals, relating to supposedly unidentified children, elderly people or injured dogs. 

But in February, we also debunked four alarmist posts, the kind aimed at terrifying communities rather than generating empathy. We fact checked bogus warnings about a “serial killer”, a man who’d supposedly murdered two police officers and an alleged knife attacker, and claims that a woman had been found stabbed by a local canal.

Hoax posts are often shared across multiple different Facebook community groups, with only the location quoted in the text changing. Altogether, we found at least 47 communities across the UK had been the victim of the nine different hoaxes we fact checked in February, including Facebook groups for big cities like Belfast, Edinburgh and Manchester and smaller places like Banbury, Melton Mowbray and Oldham.

Hoax posts frequently use old or unrelated images from different countries, often the US, to accompany the appeals. 

Tackling the problem

Our guide on seven ways to spot a hoax post, written at the time of our 2023 investigation, helps Facebook users get clued up on what to look out for.

Aside from misleading users if they are later edited into something completely different, hoax posts can also drown out genuine appeals and requests for help on community groups.

In 2023 we wrote to Meta, Facebook’s parent company, formally raising concerns about hoax posts.

We warned that “it is clear that reactive removal of posts identified by third parties is not enough to mitigate the damage that is being done”, and stressed that “the risks posed by these posts are pernicious and frequent enough to merit stronger action from Meta in terms of proactively identifying and tackling this growing trend”. 

We identified these hoax posts as part of our work with Meta’s Third-Party Fact-Checking programme, through which we receive funding to identify, review and rate viral misinformation across Facebook, Instagram and Threads (Meta does not determine which checks Full Fact publishes or have any editorial control over our content).

However in January Meta announced an end to its Third-Party Fact-Checking programme in the US, and the programme’s long-term future in the UK remains uncertain. The hoax posts problem is another example of how the curtailing of Meta's partnership with fact checkers is likely to lead to an exponential increase in online misinformation, and the real-life harms associated with it.

We have now written again to Meta to raise concerns about this problem and ask it to take action.

We have approached Meta for comment and will update this post if we hear back.

Funding from Meta. Since January 2019, Full Fact has checked images, videos and articles on Facebook and Instagram as part of Meta’s Third-Party Fact Checking programme. This work is funded by Meta. The amount of money that Full Fact is entitled to depends on the amount of fact checking done under the programme. We are fully independent and Meta does not determine which checks Full Fact publishes or have any editorial control over our content.