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Well, the scams and hoaxes never seem to stop making the rounds on Facebook and Messenger, and this one is a real doozy.
It comes in the form of an instant message from one of your friends that was supposedly originally sent out by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO.
The actual text of these messages vary somewhat, but they usually read something like this:
“Hi, I’m Mark Zuckerberg 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.
… (edited for the sake of brevity)…”
There is usually a lot more text with these messages but I truncated this one for the sake of brevity.
As you can probably guess, these messages are nothing more than are hoaxes. Their only purpose is to cause you to waste your time by forwarding them to your friends and to irritate your friends when they receive them.
There are several tip-offs that reveal these messages as hoaxes:
1 – Mark Zuckerberg (or any Facebook employee for that matter) wouldn’t announce such an important change to Facebook’s Terms of Service (TOS) by sending you a private message and asking you to forward it to your friends.
They would send it out to all the users at once, probably in a pop-up box that’s displayed as soon as the users log into their accounts.
2 – Neither Mark Zuckerberg nor Facebook are authorized to make “law”. Only a legislative body such as Congress or a state legislature can do that.
3 – The first letter of Facebook would be capitalized in any official correspondence from the company.
4 – No official notice from Facebook would be riddled with multiple grammar and punctuation errors.
Bottom line: Any time you receive an instant message or see a post in your newsfeed claiming that Facebook will be making a major change to their TOS unless you forward the message to your friends or share it on your Timeline, you can rest assured that it’s a hoax.
You won’t need to waste your time wondering about it. It’s a hoax. Simply delete it and move on. And whatever you do, don’t forward it your friends!
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