Has Facebook exceeded peak goodwill ?

"We don't care. We don't have to. We're Facebook."

• RELATED : A Breakup Letter to Facebook from Eat24 (Eat24)
• RELATED : Has Facebook gotten so successful that it doesn’t care what other people think about it ? (The New York Times)

Facebook has come under fire in a new posting on The New York Times. In a panic to shore up public confidence following its never-ending changes to news feeds, its perpetual weakening of privacy controls for its users, questions over the way Facebook distributes traffic to page "likes," and its alleged close association with the National Security Administration, Facebook has been on a buying spree -- first engulfing Whatsapp and now Oculus VR -- desperately trying to acquire new individual users to make up for the users scrambling to abandon the once mighty social media network.

But in Facebook's strategy to buy individual users, it has neglected the legion of small businesses that had turned to Facebook as part of their online marketing strategy. Case in point : Eat24.

According to The New York Times, small and growing businesses like Eat24 blame Facebook for upending the way it allows businesses to interact with individual users. "Facebook has changed its algorithms over the last couple of years to highlight more posts by individuals and bury posts from brands — unless, of course, a brand wants to pay for ads to promote its posts."

With Facebook's goodwill deteriorating with individual users and businesses that formerly enjoyed their Facebook experience, all this reminds us of comedian Lily Tomlin's hilarious satirical skits of a fictional telephone operator, Ernestine, who became famous for her trademark line : "We don't care; we don't have to. We're the phone company."

Let's see how long before the next brilliant college student invents a new social media platform that will create a wild Internet sensation amongst college students, leaving Facebook to join the land line telephone company and MySpace as obsolete telecommunication business models.

In response to Facebook.com censorship, can SumofUs.org rollout a social networking interface ?

So, Facebook.com likes to censor its users, who post information, links, or other media, such as photographs or videos, which are deemed too political in nature (or, more appropriately, too offensive to its advertisers or tax authorities). Facebook sometimes suspends user accounts for a period of time, mainly, for 30 days, according to recent examples of two of my "Facebook" friends. Considering how short-lived Myspace.com was, for all its clunky and anti-music file sharing obsession it became in its final years of relevancy, many users on Facebook.com look forward to the emergency of a new Web site, to which disaffected Facebook.com users can migrate.

For all those activists, who are "superusers" of Facebook.com, who use features like creating events for demonstrations or meeting planning, creating pages for activism campaigns, for creating groups of like-minded activists, and for creating public (or private) profiles for doing all this work, perhaps one emerging suggestion may make sense :

Seeing as how new Web sites, such as SumofUs.org, are emerging, where activists can participate in some limited function online activism, it might be fascinating to explore whether the owners-developers of Web sites, such as SumofUs.org, could add on social networking and other social app-like modules, extensions, or functionality, so that disaffected Facebook.com users can just abandon Facebook.com and just embrace one, fully-dedicated non-profit Web site, such as SumofUs.org, for their online activism and social media experience.

Imagine what online activists could do in a Web-based environment, which supported a safe space for online activism and social networking ? We wouldn't have to deal with the arbitrary censorship by Web sites, such as Facebook.com, we wouldn't have to deal with ever nebulous privacy policy changes to placate advertisers, there wouldn't be tracking, surveillance, or face recognition issues....

I imagine it would only take a small team of creative minds to mount an effort like this....

Then, we would have a newly, self-empowered community for online activism. And we could let our old Facebook.com accounts join our old Myspace.com accounts in the digital morgue of the past.