Facebook Chain Letters = Hoax

An interesting thing happened to me this morning. Several of my friends sent me a message about something going around in facebook about users having to do something and facebook was going to delete “inactive accounts” to make room for active users. I had to laugh…it was obvious to me that this was a chain letter/hoax. But apparently this is not so obvious to many facebook users.

It became enough of a problem this morning that facebook even chose to blog about it. It is nice to see facebook on top of these issues so quickly.

Here is the content of the facebook chain letter hoax email that was sent to me by my friends:
MESSAGE BEGINS
============
Attention all Facebook membeRs.
Facebook is recently becoming very overpopulated,
There have been many members complaining that Facebook
is becoming very slow.Record shows that the reason is
that there are too many non-active Facebook members
And on the other side too many new Facebook members.
We will be sending this messages around to see if the
Members are active or not,If you’re active please send
to other users using Copy+Paste to show that you are active
Those who do not send this message within 2 weeks,
The user will be deleted without hesitation to create more space,
If Facebook is still overpopulated we kindly ask for donations but until then send this message to all your friends and make sure you send
this message to show me that your active and not deleted.

Founder of Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg

I had to laugh at the line “to create more space”. Facebook knows all about your activity anyway. So you would never have to take a specified action to let them know that you were active. The fact that this chain letter has spread so fast is a testament to social networks and how they remove points of friction and allow data to flow at lightning speed through an eco-system.

Here is the official response from the Facebook Blog Regarding the Facebook Chain Letter Hoax

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 to 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.

Technorati Tags: facebook, facebook hoax

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