In September 2023, Facebook users shared a message that claimed the social media platform would soon be charging users $7.99 per month — that apparently being the only way users could continue to access the company's app and website. The posts also said that the supposedly bombshell tech news was reported by "Channel 13 News." .
A commonly shared version of the copy-and-paste post ("copypasta," in short) read as follows:
Since the $7.99 charge is coming, I do not give permission to Facebook to charge $7.99 a month to my account, also, all of my pictures are property of myself and not Facebook!
So now they are doing it, we just saw on Channel 13 News, that Facebook will be charging all users starting Monday. You can do an "opt-out" by posting the above. Hold your fingers over and copy. Bye Bye ads
Yessssss it works!!!
Just in case
However, Facebook did not make any announcements about charging users in order to use its services: not $4.99, as we previously reported, not $7.99, nor any other amount of money.
Also, no organization named "Channel 13 News" reported this rumor to be true. The inclusion of this news station with the channel number "13" is something that we previously noted had been going around for many years.
As Facebook once stated, the website's services are made possible by advertising revenue:
No, we don't charge you to use Facebook. Instead, we charge advertisers to show ads on Meta Company Products. This helps us make Facebook available to everyone without charging people for access to it.
Meta previously announced in February 2023 that it had plans to charge some users who wished to have their accounts verified with a badge. However, we found no information that would indicate Facebook would soon begin charging users to access its ordinary services.
Further, a block of legalese copied and pasted into a Facebook post isn't really an official, valid, declaration of anything.
As Jerry Seinfeld once said to Cosmo Kramer on "Seinfeld," "Well, I don't know if what you have here constitutes a legally-binding document."