Dear Friend,

This post, from a Buckinghamshire residents’ Facebook group in February claimed to be from a local who’d found a rattlesnake skulking in their toilet. Posts with near-identical wording were posted to local Facebook groups across the UK.

In July, a post in the ‘Doncaster New and Used Items for Sale’ Facebook group (and over 30 other local groups) claimed that a local girl named Sofia was missing. It included a photograph and encouraged users to share the post urgently.

All the posts were hoaxes. They are part of a wider problem—now exposed by Full Fact—of fake posts swamping local Facebook groups. The posts themselves vary greatly; from reports of serial killers at large, to people seeking their lost dogs, or asking for help finding missing vulnerable elderly people or children. But all are meant to shock the reader into sharing or reacting to the post.

Give £10 today and help end hoax posts.

Full Fact’s investigation found over 1,200 hoax posts, targeting at least 115 communities across the UK. This is likely the tip of the iceberg.

These posts seem designed to terrify communities. Their overwhelming number threatens to limit interaction with posts that are genuinely appealing for help, or mean these are wrongly dismissed as ‘just another hoax’. 

Sometimes the content of a hoax post is changed; with the hoaxers capitalising on Facebook’s editing function and the traction of the original content for financial gain. Users—having seen the original engagement with the hoax—are pushed to sites that often include fake branding for legitimate companies, before a further link sends them on to those companies’ actual websites, earning the trickster a commission for every referral. Often the deal advertised in the new content does not reflect reality, so these hoaxes are also damaging the reputation of real businesses. 

The image of missing “Sofia” in Doncaster wasn’t of a girl who was named Sofia, in Doncaster, or even missing. The “western diamondback” pictured in the Princes Risborough group post wasn’t even a rattlesnake. But this didn’t matter to the hoaxers. The missing girl post was later edited to a fake offer for chocolate. The snake post was never edited; seemingly its only purpose was to scare people. 

It is only by exposing hoax posts and making both the public and Meta aware of them, that we can tackle this particularly troubling new form of online misinformation. Please donate today and help us expose hoax posts, prevent the harm they can cause to our communities, and beat the hoaxers.  

Josey Cullen
Individual Giving Manager—Full Fact