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  • 2023-01-13 (xsd:date)
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  • Fake appeal to identify woman in ‘coma’ circulating on Facebook (en)
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  • Police are appealing for more information about the identity of a young woman in a coma who had been mugged, stabbed and left for dead in Portsmouth. This is not a real appeal. The picture used in the post is of a teenager who was critically injured in a car crash in Utah in 2016. A post on Facebook falsely claims that police are appealing for information about the identity of a young woman in a coma in Portsmouth. The post consists of a picture of an unconscious woman in a hospital bed alongside a caption which says: We need urgent help identifying a young woman who was mugged, stabbed and left for dead on the roadside. She is in a coma right now & the deputies are not able to identify her because she doesn’t have an ID on her. Let’s bump this post so it may reach people who can be able to identify her. This is not a real appeal. The picture appears to have been taken from a 2016 news story about a teenage girl who was critically injured in a car accident in the US state of Utah. There are many other posts on local Facebook groups such as a buy and sell group in Milton Keynes which use the same picture and near-identical wording. Some versions in the US and Canada have racked up thousands of shares. The phrasing of these Facebook posts is very similar to many other posts—concerning a range of false appeals including for missing children, missing pensioners and found pets—that we have checked before. One way these fake posts can be identified is by checking to see if the comments are disabled, which is often done to prevent social media users from alerting other people to the fact the post isn’t genuine. We’ve seen a number of instances where these sorts of posts are edited after reaching a lot of people, so they instead advertise surveys or housing websites. Image courtesy of Stephen Andrews 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 appeal is not genuine and the picture has been taken from an old news story. (en)
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