The latest regurgitation of the “Facebook is charging” genre of hoaxes claims that the director of Facebook, “Mark”, has announced that Facebook will cost money because the Facebook servers have become “very congested”.
The poorly worded concoction is just a mish-mash of earlier hoaxes strung together in a breathless warning that not only contradicts itself several times but is also a grammar-ridden nightmare.
The hoax can be seen below –
Hi I’m mark The Director of facebook
Hello everyone, it seems that all the warnings were real, facebook use will cost money
If you send this string to 18 different from your list, your icon will be blue and it will be free for you.
If you do not believe me tomorrow at 6 pm that facebook will be closed and to open it you will have to pay, this is all by law.
This message is to inform all our users, that our servers have recently been very congested, so we are asking for your help to solve this problem. We require that our active users forward this message to each of the people in your contact list in order to confirm our active facebook users if you do not send this message to all your facebook contacts then your account will remain inactive with the consequence of Lose all your cont the transmission of this message. Your SmartPhone will be updated within the next 24 hours, will have a new design and a new color for the chat. Dear Facebook users, we are going to do an update for facebook from 23:00 p.m. until 05:00 a.m. on this day. If you do not send this to all your contacts the update will be canceled and you will not have the possibility to chat with your facebook messages
Will go to pay rate unless you are a frequent user. If you have at least 10 contacts
Send this sms and the logo will turn red to indicate that you are a user
Confirmed … We finish it for free Tomorrow they start to collect the messages for facebook at 0.37 cents Forward this message to more than 9 people of your contacts and it will be free of life for you to watch and it will turn green the ball of above do it and you will see
Facebok is now free, send 10 people to reactivate your service again without cost
In 2018 this hoax circulated attached to a video of Mark Zuckerberg allegedly claiming he is deleting Facebook. That video, like this hoax, is fake.
The hoax above includes within in several older hoaxes, such as the assertion that sending a message to several users will result in your “icon turning blue”, a hoax that dates back a number of years.
The wording is very similar to the “Director of Facebook called Carlos” variant of the hoax that appeared in 2016 that fundamentally said the same thing albeit with some details changed.
When it comes to the persistent “Facebook are charging” genre of hoaxes, it would be more than a stretch to say that this one was particularly convincing. In the first paragraph you have to send the message on to 18 different people, and then later in the message that changes to 10 people. First it claims your “icon will turn” blue and then later is claims your logo will “turn red”.
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Then it even claims you have to send “this sms” despite the message being circulated on Facebook, not over SMS.
To make matters worse, the entirety of the message contains multiple grammar and spelling mistakes throughout and it is clear that this is just a number of blatant hoaxes strung together in one nonsensical message.
And the fact that this message is indeed passed on between users of the social networking site should be proof enough that many Facebook users will blindly do as they’re told and share any nonsense with their friends regardless of its accuracy or plausibility.
As we’ve explained a number of times, Facebook is free. It always will be free. It says so right on their login page. We’ve explained and debunked this hoax a number of different times on this site already (read about the history of this genre of hoax here) so if you’re after more information about why Facebook won’t charge its users, read our post here.