Will People Really Believe Anything? Facebook is NOT Going to Charge You

I was not online a lot yesterday. I was catching up on some much needed rest. But, when I finally did check out Facebook last night, I saw one after another of the following in my friends statuses. I will let you all remain nameless for your sake. And I noticed that a couple of you deleted the post as of this morning 🙂

“FACEBOOK JUST RELEASED THEIR PRICE GRID FOR MEMBERSHIP. $9.99 PER MONTH FOR GOLD MEMBER SERVICES, $6.99 PER MONTH FOR SILVER MEMBER SERVICES, $3.99 PER MONTH FOR BRONZE MEMBER SERVICES, FREE IF YOU COPY AND PASTE THIS MESSAGE BEFORE MIDNIGHT TONIGHT. WHEN YOU SIGN ON TOMORROW MORNING YOU WILL BE PROMPTED FOR PAYMENT INFO…IT IS OFFICIAL IT WAS EVEN ON THE NEWS. FACEBOOK WILL START CHARGING DUE TO THE NEW PROFILE CHANGES. IF YOU COPY THIS ON YOUR WALL YOUR ICON WILL TURN BLUE AND FACEBOOK WILL BE FREE FOR YOU. PLEASE PASS THIS MESSAGE ON IF NOT YOUR ACCOUNT WILL BE DELETED IF YOU DO NOT PAY”

Um, really people?? Let’s break down the reason why this would not be true:

1. Why would just copying and pasting that message exempt you from paying?? If you have to pay, you have a pay. Period!

2. Facebook  does not have time to monitor the status messages of it’s 800 million active users to see if they followed directions and copied and pasted said message.

3. This graphic popped up on the FB page in response to the rumors:

This reminded me of the email that used to circulate that said that if you forward this email to 10 friends  Microsoft will send you a FREE laptop. Yeah.. ok. 🙂

People, when you get an email/text/Facebook message such as this, do us all a favor and check out to make sure that it is legitimate before spamming all of your friends with. There are several sources:

• Ask someone tech savvy if what they say is possible
• Check out http://snopes.com/ which is a huge database of web rumors
• Check out http://urbanlegends.about.com/which is another nice site about web rumors
• Think – Does what you are reading make sense?? No? Then don’t pass it on

Thank you!