Thousands of Pakistanis fall a prey to a Facebook Hoax

No, typing BFF will not check if your Facebook account is hacked.

In the wake of news surrounding the latest controversy that over 57M Facebook accounts personal data was compromised in order to influence the US elections of 2016, there have been new trends emerging every day on the internet.

The latest Facebook hoax in this list is that typing BFF on a status will let you know if your account was compromised or not. Innocent and simple Facebook users are falling a prey to this hoax news and typing BFF everywhere. BFF is a special letter word and everywhere it is used, Facebook turns it green. Just like when you type ‘congratulations’ it turns pink and when you click on the word you can see a beautiful animation.

So every time you write BFF, it turns green for people using the latest version of Facebook application or it remains black if you are on the previous version of Facebook. A lot of people are taking the change in color for a sign that their account is not compromised.

Sorry to burst your bubble but ‘BFF’ stands for Best Friend Forever and it has no connection, whatsoever, with either your account is compromised or not.

This trend reminds us of a hoax that led to disabling of thousands of accounts in Pakistan. A picture of a child playing with a fish went viral in Pakistan last year. Anyone who shared that picture in personal messages of Facebook had their account blocked for 72 hours and in some cases, people weren’t able to access back their account. According to Facebook’s content policy, that innocent looking image of a child was marked as ‘child pornography’ and hence the accounts sharing that image came under Facebook scrutiny.

So, the lesson here for all of us is that be wary of everything you see on social media and do your own research.