A six-year old girl named Ashley is missing from her home in Lancashire, and there is an amber alert activated to find her.
The photo of the girl appears to have been taken from a 2018 article about a missing dog reunited with its family in the US. There is no evidence this is a genuine appeal.
A hoax post claiming to share a photograph of a six-year-old girl called Ashley who has gone missing from her home in Leyland, Lancashire, has been shared on Facebook.
Alongside a picture of a child hugging a large dog in a car, the post’s text says: “Help!!! MISSING Child!! #leyland
“My daughter Ashley only 6 years old went out on her bike earlier today and she still hasn't returned.She doesn’t know where she’s going, new surroundings.There is a Amber alert activated on her. Please help bump this post so we can get her home safely!! [sic]”
But this is not a real appeal. The photo appears to have been taken from a 2018 article about a dog that was returned to its family a year after going missing from its home in South Carolina.
There are other indications that the post is not genuine. Firstly, the text about a young child going missing after leaving home on a bike has appeared in a number of other hoax posts we’ve seen in the past, and we have seen the same formatting of “Help!!! MISSING Child!! #[location]” repeatedly.
Secondly, the post also claims that there is an “amber alert” activated in response to the missing child. This refers to a system used in the US, designed to provide an early warning system in order to trace abducted children.
There is a similar system in the UK, though it is called a Child Rescue Alert (CRA)—not an amber alert. The CRA works as a partnership between the police, the media and the public, and is used “where it is feared that there is a real, immediate risk to the life of a child”.
Previous posts we have checked with similar wording have referred to a “silver alert” instead. This is a system for notifying the public about missing people who may be elderly, have dementia or other conditions and which only operates in the US.
Full Fact has previously checked many different posts shared to Facebook groups which falsely raise an alarm for other missing children, abandoned infants or injured dogs. These posts are often edited later to promote property listings, with comments frequently disabled, so other social media users are unable to identify the post as a hoax.
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 verify online images which you can read here.
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Image courtesy of Zeynep Sümer |
Correction 9 August 2023
This article has been corrected to clarify who silver alerts apply to.
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 photo is of a child from the US and there is no evidence this is a genuine missing persons appeal.
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