“Facebook is closing”: this is, in summary, the news that, in a few hours, went around the web, uncontrollably. It is a hoax, as explained in an official Facebook communication.
“Facebook closes on March 15, 2011“: such a short sentence yesterday unleashed panic among Facebook-addicts, already desperate for the imminent loss of data, photos, contacts, and social relationships via Facebook.
The news – false, it’s good to clarify right away – fed itself from one wall to another, from one site to another, going around the web globally in a few hours.
An official communication from the Facebook team arrives to calm spirits, which, with a touch of irony, denies the news of the closure: “We have not received the communication regarding the closure, we will have to continue working as usual”. Not only that: it is also possible to read that it is absolutely not true that Facebook will close because “we have just begun”.
Fans of the largest social network in the world can therefore sleep soundly.
It remains to clarify how the hoax regarding the closure of Facebook on March 15, 2011 was generated and fueled.
According to a first reconstruction, some people would have taken seriously the words published on the Weekly World News site, a satire site which, among other things, has also announced that aliens will arrive on Earth to attack it in 2011.
On Weekly World News, it is read that Zuckerberg has reached such high levels of stress due to the complicated management of Facebook that he wants to close its activities in March 2011. Evidently, someone took the site’s satire very seriously and began to report the news as true and founded.
If you happen to receive emails containing the news of Facebook’s closure with suspicious links, it is good to keep in mind that it is a hoax and that someone might exploit this fake news to do spam and infect PCs.
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