I have been a Facebook member for over 7 years now. In 7 years, I have seen a financial evolution of the use of Facebook. Like you, I have to pay for some of my personal posts to be sure all my friends can see it. I have to pay to boost my articles and I have to pay to promote Women Love Tech’s page. Now Facebook announced the $3 membership to keep and use your account.
Will You Pay $3 Per Month To Keep Your Facebook Profile?
Don’t panic! It’s a Hoax!
Will Facebook start charging you to access the world’s most popular social network?
Non-sense.
But that isn’t stopping thousands of Facebook addicts from feverishly sharing a link to what they believe is a news report claiming that from November 1st you’ll be paying $2.99 every month.
If you click through on the link you will be taken to a satirical news website, not a legitimate news outlet, which has a phoney news report claiming that Facebook will soon be charging its billion users for access.
It’s nonsense of course. If it were in any way true, you would expect to see an announcement on Facebook’s official blog, or in the headlines of major online news outlets.
Instead, the only site that appears to be reporting this “breaking news” is an outlet called nationalreport.net.
The interesting thing in this fake article is the over 200 comments of Facebook users screaming at the scandal, and some put on their calendars to delete their Facebook account on the 31st of October 2014.
It’s a dirty trick, but it’s been done before – and it will happen again and again until internet users wise up and think before they share a link.
The truth is that Facebook doesn’t need to charge you. It makes more than enough money from advertisers, without needing to charge its 1,000,000,000+ users.
Indeed, forcing Facebook to pay a subscription would likely ruin its business model, as many users would revolt and go elsewhere.
Mind you, maybe charging $2.99 per month isn’t a completely daft move. I, for one, would feel much more willing to pay Facebook a small amount of money if I felt that it would mean my personal data wasn’t being monetised by Facebook, and if my being a paying customer meant that the site listened to my point of view when it came to security and privacy.
Again, my dear readers, do not believe everything you read on the Internet, the iPhone 6 Plus does not bend and Facebook will NOT charge you $3.
Image Credit: Google
