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| - Several Facebook posts being shared to local community groups claim to be someone searching for their birth parents. But the posts are fake.
One post, which appears in a Nottingham and Nottinghamshire car sales group and has almost 2,000 shares, says: “Hello my name is Javier Thomas. I was born here in Nottingham June 17 1993 looking for my birth mother or father. Mother's name is Cathy M Evans and she was only 16 at the time of my birth. That's all info I have. Please bump this post and help me reunite with my family.I really need them at this point of my life. [sic]”
There are multiple posts that have almost identical text but use different names, dates and locations. These posts appear in community groups across the UK, including Lurgan Town in Northern Ireland, Brampton in Cumbria, Wellingborough in Northamptonshire and Worthing in Sussex.
The posts all say that the user’s birth mother is named “Cathy M Evans” and ask that the post is shared to help “reunite” the user with their birth parents. However, the names of the profiles publishing these posts don’t always match what they say their name is in the post.
The posts use the same black and white image of a child. A reverse image search of the picture leads to a blog published by the design studio Pd-m in November 2021 titled “Toys & Tech we loved as children”.
The image appears to be a childhood photo shared by Richard Hall, managing director at Pd-m. None of the users posting the photo are called Richard Hall.
Full Fact has previously written about similar fake posts that circulated in December 2022 and also used this old photo. We contacted Mr Hall about the posts for a second time and will update the article if we receive a response.
We have written many times about hoaxes that are posted to community Facebook groups. Often these claims are raising an alarm about missing children, abandoned babies and lost elderly people with dementia.
Many of the posts are edited to promote freebies, cashback or property listings. Hoax posts frequently have their comment sections disabled (as is true for these posts about users finding their birth parents) to prevent people from calling out the posts as fake.
This behaviour poses a risk to user engagement with local community news because groups 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.
Image courtesy of Kelovy
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