This Sonia does not exist. However, his false story has touched hundreds of thousands of Internet users on Facebook. On May 17, 2020, an Israeli Facebook page shared a photo of a young woman holding a birthday cake and wearing a prosthetic leg.
“Hi, I’m Sonia, today is my birthday, can we read on this post. No one shared my photo because I have a disability. Can I have a blessing? Is there anyone who can share my photo? “
This call for shares has been successful: just over a year after the publication of this post, it has been and continues to be shared over 144,500 times. In addition, this post, originally written in Hebrew, is automatically translated by Facebook into the user’s language, which facilitates its virality.
FAKE OFF
Problem: the young woman pictured is actually Paola Antonini. As the remind our Israeli colleagues from the newspaper Globes, Paola Antonini is a Brazilian model.
It posted this photo on May 20, 2017 on his Instagram account. Far from being sad on her 23rd birthday, she thanks her subscribers, family and friends, one of whom gave her this cake. Paolo Antonini currently has 2.8 million followers on Instagram.
This is not the first time that photos of young women or children have been hijacked on Facebook. What to do, in this case, if you are in doubt about a similar post? If you are explicitly called upon to share a post, while also appealing to your emotions, be careful.
To trace the source of an image, you can do a reverse image search using Google, Bing (Microsoft’s search engine), or Yandex (a Russian search engine, usable in Latin characters). We explain this in more detail here.
To find the original photo of Paola Antonini from this Facebook post, a reverse search with Bing and Yandex gives a clue: these two search engines link to a Pinterest post, which uses the caption text from the model’s Instagram post. By doing a search with this text, we find the original Instagram post of May 20, 2017, which proves that Sonia is none other than… Paola!