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| - Posts appealing for information about a dog that was allegedly found in a side road in towns in Dorset and Norfolk have been shared over 2,000 times. But there’s no evidence this is a genuine appeal.
The posts say: “Hello everyone, it's been a week and I haven't found the owners of this beautiful pup we picked up on the side road in #[location]
“She's really depressed, not eating. We took her to the vet she is not chipped. Please help me bump this post so I can find the owner. [sic]”
This appears alongside two pictures of a brown and white dog wearing an orange collar inside a crate. In one image the crate appears to be indoors, while in the other it appears to be outside.
There are several indications that all might not be as it seems in the post.
Firstly, the pictures of the dog have been shared widely online in similar posts about lost pets all over the world for months. For example, one Texas-based radio station’s website wrote about the same pictures being used in fake appeals as far back as January.
Secondly, searches for the same text on Facebook show near-identical posts being shared in different groups located around the world.
While you might expect a genuine post about a lost dog to spread to a few different groups serving one geographic area, it’s obviously impossible that the exact same dog could have been found in many different locations internationally.
Thirdly, the comments on all the posts have been switched off. This is a common sign that posts like these are hoaxes, as people who are genuinely looking for information are very unlikely to limit the ways in which they can be contacted.
Finally, we have previously checked many different posts using the same or similar wording alongside a different picture, suggesting that the authors of the posts are reusing content to share in different community Facebook groups.
We have written many times before about other hoax posts, such as reports of missing children, abandoned infants or missing elderly relatives. We have seen instances in which these sorts of posts are edited later to offer cheap housing, links to surveys or other freebies.
Hoaxes can damage people’s trust in local community news, because groups can become overwhelmed with false information. As a result, genuine posts may be ignored or dismissed as false.
We have written to Meta expressing these concerns and asking the company to take stronger action in response to this problem.
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