Facebook charging $100 to message Mark Zuckerberg

In what appears to be a variation of a move that charges users $1 to send messages to people they were not friends with on Facebook, tech site Mashable has written that the social networking site is charging people a $100 fee if they want to message founder Mark Zuckerberg.

In its article which also carried a screengrab, Mashable said,

[caption id="attachment_586082" align="alignleft" width="380"] Got $100 to message the Zuck? AP[/caption]

If you try to send founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg a message on Facebook, Mashable discovered Thursday, the social network may offer to keep the message out of his "Other" Inbox - for a cool $100.

In our tests from multiple accounts, it appeared to be the case that users only get this message if they're not one of Zuck's 16 million followers. That, however, could still be coincidental.

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A number of other tech sites have reported that despite the Mashable account, they were not asked to pay a similar fee. This is one report by the Daily Dot.

But Facebook told ABCNews.com that they were "testing some extreme price points to see what works to filter spam".The report added that the $100 private message offer is an experiment not just with Zuckerberg but to those with a significant number of subscribers.

"This test will give a small number of people the option to pay to have a message routed to the 'inbox' rather than the 'other' folder of a recipient that they are not connected with," said the report, quoting Facebook. "If you select strict filtering, you'll see mostly messages from friends in your inbox."