Rumours are spreading across Facebook that claim Facebook will soon be charging users $2.99 a month.
Many of the rumours link back to a 2014 article on NationalReport.net – which seems to have initially spurred the rumour into existence – that asserts the announcement was made at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California “this morning”. Other websites have since republished the story.
Another reworded instance of this rumour popped up in January 2015 on satirical website www.ersatznews.com.
In the report, Facebook CEO Zuckerberg is quoted as saying –
However, as many of our regular readers will be aware, the rumours are entirely false and are just another recurrence of a long-running decade old hoax that claims Facebook is to imminently begin charging for its services.
Dozens of versions of this rumour have circulated for a number of years now, and we’ve previously reported on this hoax some time ago. Before Facebook this hoax targeted other services such as AOL, Hotmail, MSN Messenger and Yahoo.
Despite always being untrue (and will always be untrue in years to come) this persistent rumour continues to dupe readers who have apparently forgotten all about the last time it spread and seem willing to pass on the news to their social media friends, causing this hoax to once again go viral across the Internet.
Facebook have a banner on their homepage saying the site will, and always will be, completely free to use, thus enabling users to dismiss this hoax any and every time it pops up, now or in the future.
Secondly, NationalReport.net (UPDATE: and www.ersatznews.com) are fake news websites that purposely generate bogus news stories – under the weak guise of satire – and publishes them to attract traffic.
Basically these types of websites publish hoaxes to make money.
As always we recommend not sharing links from sites like NationalReport.net and we also recommend not sharing any articles that are just regurgitating well-known and long running hoaxes. You can see our article on sites like NationalReport.net here.
Check out our YouTube report on this hoax via our YouTube channel Sixty Second Scams here.
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