What was claimed
A photograph shows a baby girl who was found in South Lanarkshire.
Our verdict
This is a hoax. The photograph shows a baby who was found in the US in 2022.
Abandoned baby hoax uses old photo from US
11 May 2023
A Facebook post about an abandoned baby is a hoax.
The post, which appears in a South Lanarkshire local businesses group, says: “Desperately trying to find the parents of this sweet girl. She was picked up along side road in #South Lanarkshire. Please help bump this post so she can be reunited with her parents!! [sic]”
But a reverse image search shows that the photos come from a 2022 news article about a 10-month-old baby girl who was found at an airport in Minneapolis, US–not in South Lanarkshire. Following a public appeal, the child’s mother was located.
The text shared with the image is also a clue that the post is not genuine. Full Fact has written other fact checks on false claims about missing children that have almost identical text. We’ve also seen similar phrasing for hoax posts about injured dogs. Often they use the word “sweet”, say the person or animal was found at the side of a road and ask the public to “bump” the post.
These posts are sometimes edited later to promote freebies, cashback or property listings. This behaviour can harm people’s relationship with local groups by making them appear to be overwhelmed with false information. This can mean that genuine missing and lost posts potentially get ignored or—perhaps worse—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 Tony Webster
.jpg){kind=link}
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 photograph does not show an abandoned child found in South Lanarkshire and has almost identical text to other hoax posts.