14 DAY TRIAL // The term "is facebook shutting down" was one of the hottest searches of the weekend. Twitter was also flooded with tweets about it and so was Facebook. You'd think then that there clearly had to be some sort of major turn of events or some very substantiated rumor.
Well, no, that wasn't the case. The internet got wild with people voicing their fears and musing on what the bleak, Facebook-less future holds for humanity all based on one article titled "FACEBOOK WILL END ON MARCH 15th!" caps lock and exclamation point included.
The article sits next to other titles such as "Alien Spaceships to attack Earth in 2011" on Weekly World News, a site with news categories such as Sports, Politics and Mutants, clearly a publication dedicated to hard-hitting journalism.
It gets better, not will Facebook "end" in just a couple of months, the reason behind it is that CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg has reached his limit and can't handle the stress anymore.
"Facebook has gotten out of control," the article quotes Zuckerberg as saying, "and the stress of managing this company has ruined my life. I need to put an end to all the madness."
So the logical course of action is to shut down a site with close to 600 million users raising some $2 billion in funding. As far as satire goes, this is not exactly The Onion. But as far as 'trolling' goes, even 4chan would be proud of how much this thing spread.
But this is the internet and it looks like, on Facebook at least, people really do believe anything you tell them and you don't even have to try. The rumor spread like wildfire and the number of people that actually believed that Facebook would be shutting down is dumbfounding.
It got so hard that Facebook had to issue official 'confirmations' that it wasn't actually closing down, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. After several tweets and statements from Facebook and plenty of articles and blog posts, the rumor has been beaten down, yet it still manages to hold on to the number nine spot on Google's Hot Topics for the US.