Rescuers are looking for information about the owner of a dog that was found injured in a hit and run.
This is not a real appeal. The same post has been shared in many different community groups, and it closely resembles other false posts we’ve seen in the past.
More than 1,200 people have shared a hoax appeal for a dog that was allegedly found injured after a hit and run incident.
Full Fact has seen an example of the post in a buying and selling Facebook group for Eastbourne (where the vast majority of shares are concentrated) and Windsor, but also in the US.
Beyond the fact that it’s not possible for the same dog to have gone missing in all these places at once, there are several clues that not all is as it seems.
Firstly, all three posts use near-identical language, indicating that the fake appeals have been copied and pasted. The Eastbourne post, for example, says: “Hello. If anyone is looking for this sweet boy, found him lying on the side road in Eastbourne
“He was hit by a car in a hit and run incident. I took him to the vet he is not chipped I know someone is looking for him. He definitely misses his family, I’ll continue to take care of him in the meantime. Please bump this post to help me find his owner [sic].”
We have fact checked many other hoax posts using this exact language in the past, often featuring photos that have been stolen from other Facebook pages or news stories.
We were not able to trace the photo in this case, but the fact it has been shared in a number of different groups as part of different appeals is an indication that the post is not genuine.
Secondly, there are also some striking similarities in the accounts sharing the posts. While all three are different, none of them have profile pictures and all of them use a middle initial in their username, “Sara J. Owen” and “Angela N. Hage”.
While it’s not impossible that accounts with very similar names could be sharing appeals like this simultaneously, the fact that they are all sharing the exact same posts suggests that the accounts are connected in spreading false information.
Thirdly, the posts in UK groups have their comments turned off, which we often see done in order to prevent social media users from warning others about a fake post. This is not the case for the US post, which has been flooded with comments warning it’s spam.
We have previously checked many similar posts shared to Facebook groups which falsely raise an alarm for other missing children and abandoned infants, and recently published an investigation into how and why these posts are shared so widely.
These types of posts could cause local community groups to become overwhelmed with false information and potentially result in genuine appeals being ignored or—perhaps worse—criticised as fake. We have written to Facebook’s parent company Meta expressing these concerns and have asked 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 spot if a Facebook post is a hoax, which you can read here.
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Image courtesy of Brett Jordan |
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 post contains many clues that it is a hoax.
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