Facebook to Charge Monthly Fee – A Hoax or Not?

There is a rumor spreading around Facebook and other social media that starting from November 1st 2014, social media giant Facebook intends to start collecting monthly service plans. The report said that Facebook intends to charge users $2.99 monthly for the service.

This report was first carried by National report and written by Darius Rubics.

According to Darius, Facebook in a news conference on September 21st said “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,” Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg told reporters. If we don’t do something about our rising costs now, Facebook could face an unrecoverable financial burden and become obsolete.

Part of the report also stated that you can avoid the charge by doing the following:

For those who can’t manage the cost, we’ve made it real simple. In a new status update, copy and paste the words, “I AM POOR FACEBOOK PLEASE WAIVE MY MONTHLY FEE”. Make sure you include the hashtag #FacebookMonthlyFee. This will inform the Facebook billing department to waive any fees associated with your account.

This news has freaked out a lot of Facebook users.

FAKE NEWS

I proceeded to make enquiry and on wanting to contact Facebook got an article written by them.

In the article, which was actually written by Carolyn Abram, Facebook’s resident blogger, she said that Facebook can never charge its user monthly fees. She also noted that Facebook has a channel by which information is passed to its users, but can never use the below listed channels;

• Your Wall
• An inbox message from a friend in other words, chain letters.
• Messages spread through Applications if an application is telling you that Facebook is about to shut down, report it.

Here is the article from Carolyn.

Recently, chain letters have started to spread across Facebook with all sorts of misinformation. Let’s get some information out there about how we communicate with you about Facebook. Right now, there are only four ways that we try to get information to users.

1. Home Page Announcements: Home Page announcements are the big boxes that push down your News Feed. These announcements contain information that we really want you to see; changes to your account, big new products we think you might like, and any information that is required for you to use Facebook effectively.
2. Product Stories and the What’s New page: You may occasionally see stories about Facebook inside your News Feed. These contain useful tips and fun information about Facebook but are not of the same importance as Home page announcements.
3. The Blog: Since you’re here reading, you know what the blog is. This is a good place to get extended information about what’s going on at Facebook.
4. Through Pages and Updates: This is fairly new with the launch of Pages, but notice that these will appear in your “Updates” section of your Inbox, not mixed in with messages from friends. These should be few and far between the Update you saw from any Politicians you support that came from Facebook is a one-time occurrence.

We will never use any of the following methods to tell you information, or ask for you to take an action:

• Your Wall
• An inbox message from a friend in other words, chain letters.
• Messages spread through Applications if an application is telling you that Facebook is about to shut down, report it.

Since there’s been a lot of wrong information about Facebook spreading around, we’d like to clarify a few things for the record:

• We are not shutting down accounts that are not “active” enough.
• We are not going to start charging you to use Facebook.
• We will never ask you to send us your password or login information.
• We will never put the responsibility on YOU to send information to your friends. If we have information we need to share, it’s our job to get the word out.
• When we do communicate to you about the site (with the exception of posts made on this blog) it will always be from a collective Facebook. You won’t hear from me, personally, or from Mark, or from Dustin, or from any of the Facebook bloggers you’ve seen here.

So the next time you see a chain letter, chain wall post, or chain anything, report it to our User Operations team and tell all your friends to ignore it. We could make a joke here about passing this entry on to ten of your friends, but that’s not cool.

Carolyn is Facebook’s resident blogger.

ADVICE/CONCLUSION

You should not promote, share or like news sent to you from your unsuspecting friends telling you that you can avoid charges from a particular social media either Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, etc by sending/sharing the information with at least 10 of your contacts.

It always baffles me when I read such news and come to the thought that some people will actually believe such hoax and share. So Facebook users should not be afraid of any charges. Facebook only charges you when you wish to advertise with them either by promoting a website/blog or a page.