What was claimed
Relatives of a 105-year-old grandmother are asking Facebook users to share a post 210 times.
Our verdict
False. The woman pictured is not the one named in the post and is not 105-years-old.
Posts celebrating the birthday of a 105-year-old grandmother are fake
5 January 2023
A Facebook post claiming to be from the grandchild of a woman who recently reached her 105th birthday is fake.
The post, which appears on a community page for Belfast residents, says: “This is my granny, Mrs Stalla Smith. She turns 105 today. Any chance I can muster 210 shares (double her age) here on Facebook? She will be amazed and baffled in equal measure. Thank you.”
The post has been shared more than 2,600 times. However, the woman in the picture is not named Stalla Smith and is not 105-years-old.
Using a reverse image search, we traced the picture to an article in Grimsby Live from November 2021 about a great grandmother called Edna Lindley who had just turned 100.
We have also seen another version of the same post on a group for those living in the capital of the Canadian province of Newfoundland. It uses identical text but a different picture. Using a t-shirt logo visible in the image, we traced it to a July 2022 post on the Facebook page of a US-based environmental non-profit known as The Watershed Foundation.
The picture is of one of the foundation’s supporters called Mary who had just celebrated her 110th birthday.
We have written before about hoax posts involving elderly people created to generate likes and shares.
Image courtesy of Isabella and Zsa Fischer
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because the woman pictured is not the one named in the post and is not 105-years-old.