Enjoy your sigh of relief! This was one joke that people didn’t find so funny.
A report made by nationalreport.net claimed that until now, Facebook was a free social media platform but starting November 1st, Mark Zuckerberg, Co-founder and CEO, planned to charge Facebook users a fee of 2.99 per month. The article quoted Zuckerberg a California press conference stating, “we thought long and hard about this decision, but at the end of the day, we had no choice but to add this monthly fee. If we don’t do something about our rising costs now, Facebook could face an unrecoverable financial burden and become obsolete.”
The story turned out to be a hoax and to sound convincing, the article included alleged statements from Wall Street Analyst, Dale Sackrider, about the news being great for Facebook stockholders. They talk about Sackrider mentioning that even if 70% of users (which would be approximately 1 Billion users) decide to pay for the service, they could bring in more than $30 billion every month.
The article even went as far as to interview with CNN where Paul Horner, a Facebook spokesperson, said “the economic times are tight and the ads on the Facebook platform are not profitable as they had planned. Facebook is also facing an increase in costs, since more and more people are joining Facebook every day. He also stated that there are so many pictures of cats, apart from regular pics, and storing the images is an increasing cost to the company.”
There was momentary panic from many Facebook users because of this false report because of our reliance to social media, and Facebook in particular. People were afraid that they either couldn’t afford to keep paying the fee, or that it would’ve been another added expense. Luckily, if Facebook were to implement a fee, it would have a sweeping affect on businesses the use this medium to promote themselves.