Chain Messages

Occasionally, a chain message of some sort circulates on Facebook, usually saying something along the lines of whoever receives the message having to forward it to a certain number of their friends in order to keep their account. The reason given is that Facebook is getting overpopulated, and that sending the message on proves to them that you are active, so when Facebook goes through and deletes all the inactive accounts in order to make room for new ones, yours won’t be deleted.

The message described above and basically any other chain message are lies and can be ignored. In the Account Security section of the Help Center, Facebook has a page that states messages of the type described above are fake. To see the explanation for why the above message is fake, see the group “No, Your Facebook Account Will Not Be Deleted, Reset, or Harmed in Any Way”.

The reason chain messages in general can be ignored is simple: they usually claim that something will happen if you forward it to however many friends it says you need to. Classic chain e-mails will say you’ll meet the love of your life or something similar if you send it to the right number of people by a certain time, and if you see a Facebook message like this, you should have the common sense to just ignore it. However, more recent messages will promise that Facebook or some other site can track it and will do something if you send the message on. The truth is, there is no way to track messages like that, and if Facebook wanted to keep track of something, they would do it through some other means.

Trust me, Facebook has plenty of ways of keeping track of profile activity among many other things. They don’t need the help of chain messages sent by their users. The only real reason chain messages exist is because the people who start them have too much free time on their hands and want to see how many people they can trick into forwarding them on.