A Facebook user needs help to identify a man found unconscious and unresponsive in the street.
False. Posts with similar wording use different pictures of unconscious men and report them being found in locations known to be false. All their identities are known.
A Facebook post which claims to be seeking help to identify a man who is in hospital after being found unconscious and unresponsive in the street is fake.
The post, which appears on a community group page for Loughborough, says: “Help us identify this man! Today morning at 6:33 AM, in loughborough, this person was discovered unconscious & unresponsive in the streets with no apparent injuries. He did not possess any ID. Please bump Post so that his Family or friends can see [sic]”.
The post is accompanied by a close-up photograph of an unconscious man in a hospital bed with several tubes coming out of his mouth.
The same image and wording appears on posts on groups in other UK locations including Bournemouth, Wragby in Lincolnshire and Gwynedd in the north-west of Wales. Some versions of the post, such as this one from a group in Fleetwood, Lancashire, claim the man was found: “near University Ave & Reservoir Ave”.
More posts can be found on groups further afield including Ireland, Australia and various parts of the United States.
Similarly worded posts use three other pictures of unconscious men in hospital. Some claim the man was injured following a hit and run accident while riding his motorcycle.
None of the men pictured in the posts have any connection to the places where the posts have appeared and in every case the photographs were taken many years before the alleged incident took place.
Using a reverse image search, we traced the first picture and much of the original text to a tweet issued by the New York Police Department in July 2022 as part of an appeal for help in identifying an unconscious man found in the Bronx. The man was later identified.
The second image is of a man from Utah who was placed in a medically-induced coma after contracting pneumonia in August 2019. The third image is of a man from Wisconsin who was hospitalised for similar reasons around the same time.
The final image is of a man from Australia who was taken to hospital after collapsing during a court appearance in 2016.
We have written before about highly emotive fake posts which use stories of abandoned babies or children injured in hit and run accidents in order to attract likes and shares.
Image courtesy of Ian Taylor
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 men in the photographs have all already been identified and the incidents had no connection to the location of these posts.
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