A girl in a photograph has gone missing and needs to be reunited with her parents.
This is a hoax that has been repeated in many different places. The photograph of the girl is at least seven years old and has appeared in a number of different places online.
A number of posts on Facebook claim to show a little girl who has been found and needs to be reunited with her parents.
One example of the post that appeared in a Facebook group for Bexleyheath says: “Desperately trying to find the parents of this sweet girl. She was picked up along side road in Maison .Please help bump this post so she can be reunited with her parents!! [sic]”
We’ve also seen similar posts adapted for use in Beecher, Illinois, Uvalde, Texas, and Louisville, Kentucky.
In fact, the posts, which have appeared in local Facebook groups for many different locations, use a picture that is at least seven years old.
The earliest example we’ve been able to find appeared in a Tumblr post in 2015, which said it had been submitted by someone living in New Mexico in the US. The same photo was later used in a MailOnline article in 2016.
Hoax posts like these, which ask people to share them, are extremely common on social media, and we have written about them many times before. They often claim to be alerts about missing children, dogs or pensioners.
As we have written before, a clue that a missing person alert may be a hoax is that the comments have been disabled, which may stop Facebook users who identify the hoax warning other people against sharing it. (Most of the posts we’ve seen sharing this photo had comments disabled.)
The reason for the hoax posts isn’t always clear, but we’ve previously seen them edited to promote freebies, cashback or property listings.
Hoax posts like these could overwhelm local community groups with false information. As a result, genuine missing person posts could 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.
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.
Image courtesy of Timothy Hales Bennett
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 post is a hoax, and the photo which supposedly shows a girl who has just been found is at least seven years old.
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