Facebook (FB) better shape up fast or it just might end up like the many tech apps that had been discarded by people after rendering themselves irrelevant in the finicky world of social media. Remember the late unlamented Friendster?

Just days back, FB posted the biggest single-day loss by any company listed on Wall Street, touched off by its disastrous quarterly report. In a blink of an eye, FB’s capitalization dropped by $119 billion to $510 billion.

Before Mark Zuckerberg’s social interaction company took that hit, no publicly listed company in the US stock market has ever lost $100 billion in just a day of trading.

Only Intel shedding $90.74 billion during the September 2000 dot-com bubble would comparatively come close to the FB debacle.

Other big losers had been Microsoft with $80 billion slashed from its market cap, Apple dropping $59.6 billion in 2013 and Exxon Mobil losing $52.5 billion in 2008.

The humongous losses of FB financially reflect the many things that have gone wrong and are going wrong with its social media platform, like its banning of images of Reuben’s oil paintings on account of featured topless women.

The Flemish tourism board has, in fact, filed a formal protest with FB over its dysfunctional application of its Community Standard, in which it said it can take action against reports of “hate speech, violence and graphic content, adult nudity and sexual activity and cruel and insensitive posts.”

The other day, the Daily Tribune fell at the receiving end of FB’s censorship when, for a couple of hours, it stopped its members from sharing an article dated 28 July entitled “De Lima arraigned on drug charges.”

Clearly, FB arbitrarily and capriciously censored the sharing of an article that was a factual account of the detained senator’s arraignment on drug charges before a local court.

Only the yellow trolls could have found malice in the article written by the Daily Tribune’s most senior writer, Mario J. Mallari and that’s to be expected.

What’s unacceptable is FB censoring a news item on the mere reports of such trolls, without first determining that the Daily Tribune has been publishing uninterrupted — printed and then also online — in the last 18 years.

FB’s policy of immediately taking down posts or stopping the sharing of online materials on the mere reports of trolls is akin to shooting first then asking questions later.

The irony in all this is that FB has been quick to censor materials from legitimate news organizations while it allows its platform to be flooded with patently and obviously fake news and “snuff videos” like a baby being hanged to death by its father.

At the very least, FB should make a list of all legitimate news organizations and then give them the benefit of the doubt of allowing the sharing of their items until questioned items are indeed found by its fact-checkers to have transgressed FB’s Community Standard.

FB ever heard of the axiom “innocent until proven guilty?”

On a final point, FB’s choice of Rappler and Vera Files as fact-checkers is dumbfounding because the two organizations have a conflict of interest “fact-checking” their rivals in the Philippines in news dissemination like the Daily Tribune.

Of three FB fact-checkers in the Philippines, only Agence France Presse is acceptable because while it is also a news organization, it does not compete directly with end-users of its syndicated stories, photos and videos.

In short, FB’s fact-checkers must not be in competition with those in the mainstream media they fact-check because then their judgment would be dubious and colored.