An injured puppy has been found at the side of the road.
This is not a real appeal. The picture used in the post has been circulating on Reddit since at least 2017 and has been used in fake posts in the UK, the US and Canada.
Hoax posts claiming to show a picture of a puppy that has been found injured by the side of the road have been shared hundreds of times on Facebook.
The posts, which feature a picture of a very young puppy wearing a bright blue cast on its leg, have been posted in local interest groups in Faversham, Kent, and Colchester, Essex, as well as in the US and Canada.
They all feature near-identical text, which reads: “Hello. If anyone is looking for this sweet boy, My husband found him lying on the side road in [relevant local area] , was hit by a car in a hit and run incident. We took him to the vet he is not chipped I know someone is looking for him. Please bump this post to help me find the owner [sic]”.
This is not a real appeal. The picture has been circulating on Reddit since at least 2017, and we have checked many similarly fake posts in the past using almost exactly the same wording.
The comments appear to have been turned off on most of the posts which is an indication, as Derbyshire Police has previously warned, that the post is a hoax.
Full Fact has previously checked many different messages posted to community Facebook buy, sell or trade groups, which falsely raise an alarm for missing pensioners, abandoned infants or missing children. In the past we’ve seen posts like these edited later to promote freebies, cashback or property listings.
This behaviour means that local groups could become overwhelmed with false information. As a result, genuine missing and lost posts could get ignored or—perhaps worse for those desperately searching for loved ones—dismissed as false. We have written to Meta expressing these concerns and asking the company to take stronger action in response to this problem.
It’s always worth checking whether content is real before you share it. We have written a guide on how to verify viral images which you can read here.
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Image courtesy of Dawid Sokołowski |
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 this is not a real appeal. The picture has been circulating on Reddit since at least 2017.
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