You may have seen a cautionary message on Facebook over the past few days, warning you to repost some legalese or risk sacrificing your almighty privacy to the social network.

Alternately, you may have seen it toward the beginning of December.

Or in November 2012.

Or in June 2012.

Or at other random times over the past three years.

The Facebook warning hoax is a special, pernicious kind of hoax — the kind that flares back up, long after it's been debunked.

To summarize the work of previous debunkers: No, Facebook does not own the copyright to everything you post; no, posting a gibberish “statement” about your “rights” doesn't establish them or override Facebook's Terms of Service; yes, you are an idiot if you fell for this ... again.

Misinformation is rampant on the Internet, but this type of long-lived, recurring hoax is a more unusual breed.

At some point, you can't even call these things hoaxes, because they exist in perpetuity. Psychologist Stuart Vyse classifies chain messages as a form of superstition — like lucky charms.

Legends like the recurring Facebook message promise to ward off things that we fear or don't understand: vast corporations, complex copyright laws, the looming specter of big data and disappearing privacy. That a status update could protect against those things makes no sense, but it vindicates and comforts whatever vague anxieties we feel.

“These narratives are believed because they construct and reinforce the worldview of the group within which they are told, or because they provide us with coherent and convincing explanations of complex events,” the media scholar Dylan McLemore wrote of chain emails in 2011.

People keep posting that warning because they don't understand Facebook. A “privacy notice” is, at least, something they can swallow.

That makes them look a bit more sympathetic, I think; poor, gullible, technophobic rubes, just seeking a foothold in these fierce Internet tides.

At the same time, it means we'll probably see the Facebook hoax again. And again. And again.

Enjoy!

Caitlin Dewey writes for The Washington Post.

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