What was claimed
A little girl gets a dollar towards her kidney transplant every time her picture is shared.
Our verdict
This is not true. The picture is from 2017, of a girl with leukemia, whose family was encouraging people to donate blood.
Posts claiming ‘every share earns money’ for sick children tend to be fake
16 September 2021
A post on Facebook with a picture of a little girl in hospital claims: “She gets a dollar for every pic that's shared it goes towards her kidney transplant”.
Although the post is from 2018, it has been going viral again recently and has been shared around 9,000 times.
The same picture appears in an article posted in October 2017 on the website Click Paraná, which says the four-year-old had been diagnosed with leukemia, and encouraged readers to donate blood to the Brazilian hospital where she was being treated, or their local blood bank.
Later that year, the now-defunct digital culture arm of Spanish-language newspaper El País reported that her picture was being used to claim she needed a bone marrow transplant, and that one peso would be donated every time the photo was shared on WhatsApp.
Her mother reportedly told the paper (translated from Spanish via Google) that “we are not asking for money nor have we asked for anything to be shared" and instead they were encouraging local people to give blood.
She said: “We are campaigning for blood donations at the Erasto Gaertener hospital, since during treatment, for at least two years, she will need blood and platelets.”
Posts on social media claiming that money will be donated per share tend not to be true. In this case, we used a reverse image search to find the genuine source of the image. If you want to read more about how to spot misleading images online, you can read our blog post on the subject.
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 money won’t be donated when you share the post and it’s of a girl in 2017 whose family were encouraging people to donate blood while she was being treated for leukemia.