Outline
Report circulating via social media claims that Facebook will begin charging its users $2.99 per month from November 1st 2014 in an effort to counter rising costs.
Brief Analysis
The claims in the message are untrue. Facebook has not announced any plans to start charging users a monthly fee for access to normal site services. The story comes via the ‘satirical’ fake-news website National Report. Nothing published on National Report should be taken seriously. Several similar ‘Facebook to start charging’ hoaxes have circulated in recent years.
Example
Facebook To Begin Charging Users $2.99/mo Starting November 1st
Menlo Park, CA — At a press conference this morning, Facebook rolled out their new monthly service plan which begins November 1st of this year. The social media giant says they will start charging members $2.99/mo to use the services that the site has to offer.
Detailed Analysis
According to a report that is circulating rapidly via social media, Facebook will begin charging users a monthly fee of $2.99 for its services starting on November 1, 2014.
The report claims that Facebook management was forced to implement the fee to counter rising costs. Supposedly, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told reporters that Facebook could ‘cease to exist in the near future’ if the fee was not implemented.
However, the claims in the story are untrue. Facebook has not announced any plans to start charging users for the normal services it offers. The report is yet more nonsense churned out by the fake-news website National Report.
National Report considers itself as satirical, although many would argue that the endless stream of drivelling nonsense that the site produces is not at all worthy of a satire label.
Nothing published on National Report has any credibility and the site’s stories should not be taken seriously.
Unfortunately, the site presents its fictional articles in news format. And, it no longer displays a clear or easily accessible disclaimer to inform users that the reports are not true.
Thus, many people are duped into sharing the material with their friends because they mistakenly believe that National Report articles are genuine news reports.
In fact, the National Report article is just the latest in a long series of silly hoaxes that have circulated for several years.
The report claims that poor users can avoid the monthly fee by posting the message, ‘I AM POOR FACEBOOK PLEASE WAVE MY MONTHLY FEE’.
This silly claim is reminiscent of earlier hoaxes that claimed users could avoid an upcoming fee by sharing a message with all their Facebook friends.
Regardless of the version, all claims that Facebook is about to start charging are nonsense. As it says on the Facebook login page, ‘It’s free and always will be’.
More and more bogus news reports have circulated in recent months, courtesy of a growing number of fake-news ‘satire’ websites.
It is therefore wise to check the veracity of any ‘news’ stories that come your way via social media before you share them. A quick search on Google News or another online news portal will likely reveal if a story is true.
Original Source : https://www.hoax-slayer.net/hoax-facebook-to-begin-charging-users-from-november-1st/