A Facebook user is appealing for help to find her five-year-old niece who has gone missing.
The post is a hoax. The post uses a photo from a US article about an eight-year-old child who was found in March 2023 after being kidnapped in 2018.
A Facebook post appealing for help to find a missing five-year-old girl from South Tyneside is a hoax.
The post appears in a community buy-and-sell group for South Shields in the North East of the UK. It says: “Please Help!!! My niece who’s 5 years old went out on her bike earlier today in South Shields and still hasn't returned. Her name is Sofia. We recently moved in, so she isn’t familiar with the area yet. There is a silver alert activated on her. Please help bump this post so we can get her home safely!! [sic]”
The post shares a photo of a young girl who is supposedly Sofia. However, a reverse image search shows that the photo actually comes from a US article about a child from Washington state who was kidnapped in 2018 by her biological, non-custodial mother. The child, who was found alive and safe in March 2023, is not called Sofia and is eight years old, rather than five.
Another clue that the post is a hoax is that it refers to “silver alerts”. As Full Fact has written before, this is a way of notifying the public about missing people who may be elderly, have dementia or other conditions and which only operates in the US. It is not used in the UK.
The post’s comment section has been disabled. As Derbyshire Police has previously warned, this is a common sign of a hoax post because it stops people from commenting to alert other Facebook users that the post isn’t real.
Beyond this, the details in the post are also very similar to another hoax post we have written about recently. Both posts refer to a five-year-old girl called Sofia who has not returned from a bike ride in an unfamiliar area. Other fact checks we’ve written on hoax posts about injured pets, missing people and abandoned babies also use similar phrasing, such as asking people to “bump” the post to help spread the appeal.
We have seen hoax posts like these being edited to offer cheap housing, links to surveys or other freebies. This behaviour means that local groups may become overwhelmed with false information and that people genuinely trying to trace relatives or look for missing loved ones could get ignored or even dismissed as false.
We have written to Meta expressing these concerns and asking the company to take stronger action in response to this problem.
Image courtesy of Solen Feyissa
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 comes from a US article about a child who was found in March 2023 after being kidnapped in 2018.
Full Fact fights for good, reliable information in the media, online, and in politics.
Bad information ruins lives. It promotes hate, damages people’s health, and hurts democracy. You deserve better.
