Earlier this month, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan announced that they would donate 99% of their Facebook shares to charity.
Since the Zuckerbergs announced this initiative, a chain letter has been circulating Facebook suggesting that the CEO will randomly gift millions of dollars to a select few Facebook users sharing the post. This is a hoax, however. There’s no truth to it. The post, which Facebook officially debunked on Dec. 9, promises the following:
“Mark Zuckerberg has announced that he is giving away $45 billon of Facebook stock. What you may not have heard is that he plans to give 10% of it away to people like YOU and ME! All you have to do is copy and paste this message into a post IMMEDIATELY. At midnight PST, Facebook will search through the day’s post and award 1000 people with $4.5 million Each as a way of saying thank you for making Facebook such a powerful vehicle for connection.”
Facebook responded to the hoax to confirm that Zuckerberg has no such plan. “Friends don’t let friends copy and paste memes,” the official Facebook account posted. “While Priscilla and Mark’s pledge to give money to improve the world is real, not everything you read on the internet is, and they’re not giving it away randomly. Be safe out there, sweepstakes seekers.”
Viral scams such as this are relatively common on social networks. In September, for instance, an elaborate hoax suggested that changing your Facebook status to a specific block of legalese text would make any content you share on the social network more private. This too turned out to be false.
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