Safety Check will now be activated on human disasters, not just natural disasters triggered by nature's forces

Nov 16, 2015 21:15 GMT  ·  By

During the past weekend, after the ISIS Paris attacks, Facebook activated two features. One was the ability to overlay the French flag on top of your avatar as a sign of support for the victims, and the other was aimed at Facebook users living in Paris, who were thus provided with the ability to confirm that they were safe and automatically post a message on their timeline.

While both are quite old and have been used before, one was not initially developed to be deployed for events like the ones that happened this weekend.

That tool is Facebook Safety Check, a feature created after the Japan tsunami and nuclear disaster at Fukushima, and deployed for the first time during the Nepal earthquake.

Paris was the first time Safety Check was turned on for a terrorist attack

"Many people have rightfully asked why we turned on Safety Check for Paris but not for bombings in Beirut and other places," said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder and CEO in a comment on his own French flag-themed profile image. "Until yesterday, our policy was only to activate Safety Check for natural disasters. We just changed this and now plan to activate Safety Check for more human disasters going forward as well."

Zuckerberg's decision might have had something to do with the fact that countless French users were asking each other if they were safe via their timelines, and turning the feature on made the most sense.

The most common explanation for why Facebook turned on Safety Check for Paris and not the Beirut bombings one day earlier may be the fact that Paris had enough Facebook traffic so that the company's engineers would take notice.

Of course, pundits and SJWs (social justice warriors) will get on the company's back about not turning it on for other attacks in countries like Palestine, Kenya, or Lebanon, but what's important is that the tool is now active.

While the company has previously launched many useful tools, most addressing our hedonistic nature, Facebook's Safety Check system, even if rarely used, might be the company's greatest creation.