Hoaxes and misinformation are a big part of Facebook, whether it’s the repeated information about Mars passing close to earth in August – this happened in 2003 and has been reported on Facebook every year since – or one of the many “1,000,000 likes and my dad quits smoking” pages. The latest hoax has a bent towards photography.
According to whoever started the post off initially, a new Facebook policy change will make it so that your photo copyrights will belong to the company, rather than to you. This is, of course, complete bunk. The message insists that you repost a specific piece of precedent – which doesn’t even apply – and that this will somehow save your copyrights.
The hoax even got so big that Facebook took time to speak out on it. “There is a rumor circulating that Facebook is making a change related to ownership of users’ information or the content they post to the site. This is false. Anyone who uses Facebook owns and controls the content and information they post, as stated in our terms. They control how that content and information is shared. That is our policy, and it always has been.”
