With some Facebook users, most of them from France, having recently reported that the "private messages" which they had sent between 2007-2009 had suddenly started showing up as messages "Posted by friends" on viewable Timelines, Facebook has clarified that the messaging rumor is `false.'

In its attempt to assuage concerns about the messaging rumor, Facebook told BBC that the private messages which some users were claiming had appeared on public timelines were actually the messages their "older wall posts that had always been visible on the users' profile pages."

With Facebook asserting that its was sure of the fact that the messaging rumor did not involve any breach of users' privacy, an unidentified `inside' source at the company informed BBC that the social network's engineers claimed that there was "no way" in which the private messages of users could get mixed up with public timelines.

Going by the information shared by the source, Facebook had never created any such mechanism whereby the users' private messages could be published on their wall or timeline.

In addition, the source also drew attention to a similar earlier incident, in which a rumor of the same kind had started making rounds last year; but the buzz had turned out to be untrue, and could not be substantiated even after an "extensive investigation."