Fact Check

Mark Zuckerberg Removing Clinton, Trump Pages for Facebook Likes

A like-farming scam claims that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg will delete Donald Trump's and Hillary Clinton's Facebook pages in exchange for 500,000 likes.

Published Sept. 29, 2016

Claim:
Mark Zuckerberg will delete Donald Trump's or Hillary Clinton's Facebook pages for 500,000 likes.

An image purportedly showing a conversation between a Facebook user and the founder of that social network giant, Mark Zuckerberg, in which Zuckerberg supposedly promised to delete GOp candidate Donald Trump's Facebook account for a certain number of likes, comments and shares was circulated in September 2016:

uckerberg trump

A nearly identical message involving Hillary Clinton was also circulated:

zuckerberg clinton

Neither of the above-displayed conversations was real. They are examples of a like-farming scam that involves the posting of fake and salacious material in an attempt to generate likes and shares on Facebook. Scammers can then use their sudden social media popularity to push scammy ads or malware on users.

The Trump prank was originally published by "Gavin McCaster" on 17 September 2016. While that post has garnered more than the requisite 500,000 likes, 50,000 comments, and 20,000 shares (as of this writing it has 1.2 million likes, 245,000 comments, and 250,000 shares), Donald Trump's Facebook page is still active.

A nearly identical hoax was posted earlier this month, claiming that Donald Trump would voluntarily leave Facebook if a given post received a certain number of likes, shares, and comments. That message also turned out to be fake.

Dan Evon is a former writer for Snopes.