Facebook posts don’t show man recently hit by car

Posts on Facebook have falsely claimed to show photos of a man who had recently been hit by a car. The image being used in the posts, however, actually shows a man who was hospitalised with Covid-19 in the US in 2021 and died that year.

Hoaxes like these are often shared on local Facebook groups, but they later get edited to redirect traffic to something completely different, such as sites promoting cashback or housing.

The latest we’ve seen are posts shared in Facebook groups for communities in Luton and Biggleswade in Bedfordshire, as well as Finsbury Park in London.

The text of all three posts is almost identical, but the location has been edited to match the location of the Facebook group. For example, the post shared in the group for Luton says: “Please Help! This young man was hit by a car a few hours ago near Luton. He had no ID on him and is still unconscious. We are trying to reach his family or friends — please share or bump this post to help us find someone who knows him.”

All three posts are accompanied by the same image, which shows a man lying in a hospital bed with a bandaged head and his eyes closed, and who has a breathing tube inserted. He appears to be connected to multiple medical devices.

However this photo does not show a man who was recently hit by a car in the UK. Reverse image searches show that the photo is of a man named Josh Tidmore, who was hospitalised with Covid-19, and died in August 2021 in the US state of Alabama.

Earlier this year, we saw the same photo of Mr Tidmore used in other social media posts which falsely claimed a man had been stabbed and found in a car submerged in a canal.

We’ve written before about similar posts falsely raising the alarm for missing people, abandoned infants and injured dogs in Facebook community groups. Our 2023 investigation into these types of hoax posts found they’re often edited later to include links to surveys, freebies or cheap housing.

In February, we found these hoax posts continue to be an issue, with at least 47 communities across the UK having been victim to nine different hoaxes we fact checked that month.

Hoaxes pose a risk to user engagement with local community news because groups can become overwhelmed with false information. As a result, genuine posts may be ignored or dismissed as false. We have written to Meta expressing these concerns and asking the company to take stronger action in response to this problem.