A message is spreading across Facebook that claims “tomorrow morning” users will be invited to enter their payment information since Facebook have decided to charge a fee.
The message also asserts that in order to avoid this apparent fee, users can copy and paste a message to their wall where upon their icon will “turn blue” and they can avoid the charge. The message can be seen below.
ATTENTION: Tomorrow morning, when you connect to Facebook, you’ll be invited to payment info… It’s official… It was even on the news. Facebook will begin to charge fees because of charges of profile. If you copy this on your wall your icon will be blue and Facebook will be free to you…
Copy and paste to your wall
This is simply just another variant of a long running hoax that asserts Facebook will be free for those that copy and paste a message onto their wall to avoid a charge. A number of hoaxes over the years have made various false claims that include –
1. Facebook are to introduce a free
2. You can avoid the fee by copying an arbitrary message to your wall
3. Your Facebook icon will turn blue once you do this.
In fact in 2016 at least two further variants have spread, such as this example and this near identical example.
Additionally the assertion that this was “on the news” is also false. No mainstream media outlet have claimed Facebook are going to start charging. Facebook is a free service since that is how their business model works. In fact it even claims on the Facebook login page that the social networking is free and always will be. We discuss why Facebook will never introduce a charge for their service in our blog post here.
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The claim that people can avoid the charge by posting a nonsense message to their timeline is as false as it is blatantly asinine. It simply makes no sense to allow certain people to avoid a charge merely by performing a completely trivial task. In reality users are asked to copy and paste a message to make the hoax go viral.
These silly claims have been spreading for years, and have in the past targeted many other services. An early version of this hoax actually spread in the early 2000s, only it was MSN Messenger where your icon would supposedly turn blue.
Facebook are not introducing a charge, and these silly rumours should be put to rest.