Around 15 million or so people noticed last Tuesday that there was no bomb or large explosion anywhere in Bangkok. None of those people worked for Facebook, which is OK, but after the "explosion", people who work for Facebook insisted there was, actually, an explosion.
That is exactly when it all went wrong. Any computer algorithm can create an error. But only humans can be spectacularly bull-headed. That is where and when it went from Facebook to Fakebook, from The Man Who Always Told the Truth to The Boy Who Cried Wolf.
There's an extensive and important background to this. During last year's US presidential election, Facebook -- the planet's largest news publisher -- was accused (or credited or blamed, pick one as you wish) of placing "fake news" items.
After the election, uncomprehending Hillaryites fingered Facebook for swaying stupid people to vote for the Orangeman.
Because of these mostly silly, generally uninformed and hysterical accusations, the sensitive, entirely inexperienced news proprietor and billionaire Mark Zuckerberg (long story short) fired his editors, fired his Safety Check staff.
He replaced these unemployed humans with computer algorithms. This was because he knew machines could never be dumb enough to fall for fake news about explosions in Bangkok, for example.
The important supporting cast in this drama is an interesting, seven-year-old US internet firm, Netventure24 -- by "interesting" we mean shadowy with lots of aliases and an executive list as difficult to track down as the government's actual plan for a single internet gateway.
Its advertising brochure brags shamelessly: "We have the latest and breaking local news from the biggest cities in the world." Its network is called Big City Informer and it has many sub-websites that go by the generic name "Informer", preceded by the city: DubaiInformer, LondonInformer and so on. And BangkokInformer.com.
Here is your guide to the reputation-reliability of Bangkok Informer in two sentences. It has republished columns from this page without even asking for permission, let alone receiving it. Our pathetic biography page on this story-scraper has a 1994 photo of the eponymous jazz drummer -- that is, the one who is actually talented.
On Tuesday about 8.20pm, BangkokInformer.com published a story with the headline, "Thailand: Explosion rocks central Bangkok". It had no date, but it credited BBC News and had 10 comment-links which did contain the date of the news -- August 17, 2015, which was not last Tuesday.
Less than an hour after the Bangkok Informer's strangely regurgitated story of the Aug 17, 2015, Erawan Shrine bombing, the Facebook Safety Check came on. All around Bangkok, Facebook fans confirmed they were safe from the explosion, and then they and families and friends and cousins and in-laws and outlaws began asking questions such as "Huh?" and "what explosion?" and "where was this?"
After an hour, Facebook turned off the Safety Check and deleted all messages, and more importantly all the evidence it used to declare an explosion had occurred. They memory-holed it all.
Over at Netventure24, a bright spark turned off BangkokInformer.com "for maintenance" in an attempt to memory-hole its part in the story.
Both these obfuscation efforts were as successful as Thai Airways International's attempt to disguise a runway skid by painting over the airline's logo. Note to Facebook: You don't delete stuff from the internet.
We know Facebook used the false rerun of the Erawan bomb to inform tens of millions of people about the Bangkok explosion because the memory-hold Security Check page shows it did.
We know Facebook made no attempt to deny, undo or apologise for the fake news it sent out to its billion customers.
And we know Facebook concocted a story about how our story about a protester throwing ping-pong firecrackers at 9am led to a Facebook Safety Check and bomb scare, "verified by a third party" at 9pm, which anyone is free to believe but probably no one does.
We know that Hong Kong-based Hill and Knowlton Strategies (official motto: "We Help Brands and the Public Communicate"), on behalf of Facebook, tried to intimidate editorial staff to at least remove "fake" from stories. Too late, Facebook was already Fakebook.
The company could have remained Facebook if it had admitted an error and explained how it would try to prevent another one. Instead, Fakebook has soiled itself and become the firm that cried wolf.