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In September and October 2021, social media users enthusiastically shared a stark warning about the dangers of celebrating National Daughters Day online. The day, usually marked on or around Sept. 25, is a relatively recent initiative (although it has much older precursors), and is not an officially designated special day in the United States. It is usually celebrated informally, with social media users posting messages of appreciation for their daughters, often accompanied by photographs and the hashtag #NationalDaughtersDay. However, one widely shared copy and paste message advised readers of a distinctly sinister agenda behind the trend: The dire warning did not include any supporting evidence, and was attributed only to an unnamed colleague who advises large companies on digital security. In other examples, the advice was attributed to a professional in digital security or simply, a very good source. The exact origins of a National Daughters Day in late September are somewhat unclear, and it's possible that some malicious actors have used the raft of social media photographs that accompanies it for nefarious purposes (though even this hypothesis suffers from a lack of affirmative evidence, and a significant logical flaw). However, the claim that the occasion exists only as a means of extracting data points, or was manufactured in Eastern Europe and Russia is contradicted by the absence of evidence to that effect, as well as the existence of a far more plausible alternative — that the Sept. 25 date evolved alongside a recent innovation in India, namely Daughter's Day, which falls on the final Sunday of September, and was originally intended as a way to combat the stigma historically associated with the birth of daughters, as well as gender discrimination and inequality. As a result of these considerations, we are issuing a rating of False as to the claim that National Daughters Day is no more than a sinister plot by malevolent actors in Russia and Eastern Europe, to acquire personal data through social media posts. The earliest reference to National Daughters Day that Snopes could find came in a December 1932 news article which referred to a celebration overseen by a Vermont chapter of the Daughters of Union Veterans. After that, there were stray references to various calendar dates, in news reports from 1939, 1940, and 1949. In March 1950, U.S. Rep. Tom Steed, D-Okla., introduced H.R. 7938, a bill to designate the second Sunday in April as National Daughters Day, but the legislation appears to have died in the House Judiciary Committee, and was not included in a list of bills passed by the 81st Congress. Despite its not being made official, some Americans appear to have marked National Daughters Day in April during the 1950s, but from the 1960s onwards, talk of the day all but disappears from the archives. In 1992, the annual Take Our Daughters to Work Day tradition began, but references to a National Daughters Day, as such, do not recur in the U.S. context until the 2010s. In 2014, for example, a few stray references, on various dates, could be found on Twitter, but the following year, 2015, National Daughters Day content began to coalesce around the end of September, with Kris Jenner among the most prominent early celebrities to mark the occasion on social media. Our examination of social media references to National Daughters Day since 2015 did not yield evidence consistent with its being part of a Russian or Eastern European plot, but rather suggested that it was chiefly spread via posts by influential celebrities, and then simply accepted by millions of social media users, over the past few years. The timing of the day (the final week of September, typically Sept. 25 or 26) also strongly suggests an evolutionary link with Daughters Day, which has been celebrated in India on the final Sunday in September, in recent years. In a 2007 interview, Anil Moolchandani, managing director of the Indian greeting cards company Archies, claimed partial responsibility for coming up with the new occasion, and explained that the initiative was in part designed to combat gender discrimination in India: In addition to these highly plausible alternative explanations for the emergence and spread of National Daughters Day, the hypothesis that the trend is part of a plot to elicit and obtain private data from publicly posted photographs suffers from two major flaws. Firstly, we could find no evidence that the trend was driven by such a plot. Secondly, that theory made little sense anyway. Social media users routinely post millions of photographs of themselves, their friends and their family members, including their children. Nefarious actors wishing to harvest images in order to feed them into facial recognition algorithms would hardly be short on content to begin with, and the notion that they would need to secretly orchestrate a particular online trend in order to stimulate the production of data that is already readily available, simply does not check out.
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