海角大神

Fool me once, shame on you, the saying goes. But fool Facebook users multiple times and, well, will we ever learn? The latest hoax has led many of the site's users to copy and paste a sort of 21st-century chain letter into their status, which may read something like this:

At the same time, another hoax is making the rounds, claiming that users may lose the rights to pictures and content shared via Facebook unless a legal notice is posted as a status.聽

According to聽Snopes.com, about a dozen of these viral lies have cropped up since 2009. 聽

Caitlin Dewey, a culture critic for the Washington Post, lamented on Twitter Tuesday morning that her story,聽"Why that Facebook copyright hoax will never, ever die" is again relevant, ten months after it was published, which was when the last Facebook hoax pervaded news feeds the world around. In her story, from January, Ms. Dewey offered up the following theory for why we keep falling for it:

Whatever the underlying fears that perpetuate this now routine prank, Facebook responded to this latest one with, of course, a status update: "While there may be water on Mars, don't believe everything you read on the internet today. Facebook is free and it always will be."

If you need a refresher, click here for Facebook's actual Terms of Service, which states in part, "You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your聽privacy聽and聽application settings." Though, as Gizmodo's Kate Knibbs聽notes, by using Facebook, you give the company聽鈥渁 non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook.鈥澛營n other words, Facebook already has permission to distribute any content you post, and nothing you copy and paste can change that.