If you’ve been on Facebook at all recently, it will have been hard to avoid posts like this from well meaning, but nonetheless, gullible individuals.
Obviously, this is a hoax and not even a new one. A similar version was being debunked as early as 2012, if you can believe that. The only large scale hoax post that seems to predate it is the one claiming that Facebook is going to start making users pay to use the service.
The post shows a drastic lack of understanding of basic copyright law as regards media posted on the site as, for instance, photos are owned by the person who took them, and not the network they are posted on.
A spokesperson for Facebook clarified this to the Mirror back in January, saying: “We have noticed some statements that suggest otherwise and we wanted to take a moment to remind you of the facts — when you post things like photos to Facebook, we do not own them.
“Under our terms, you grant Facebook permission to use, distribute, and share the things you post, subject to the terms and applicable privacy settings.”
It’s the terms and conditions that are the kicker, and people are understandably concerned about Facebook using their content without their knowledge. But, you agreed to these settings when you agreed to use Facebook and, as it turns out, that status is not even close to legally binding. Especially when you’ve misspelled “tacitly”.
As if that’s not enough, the “Rome Statute” is the treaty that established the International Criminal Court, and bears no relation to social media or Facebook’s privacy policies.
Facebook themselves debunked the claims in this posts, explicitly calling it out as a hoax:
Websays uses Facebook’s API to identify posts like this, track their volume, reach and impact so we can see how news, gossip and hoaxes travel around the internet.