New Delhi: Following the deadly terrorist attacks in Paris, social networking giant Facebook activated its ‘Safety Check’ for Parisians so that friends and family could know about their whereabouts and be assured of their safety.
The Safety Check tool automatically sends users in the affected area a note asking if they're safe. When a user clicks "Yes, let my friends know," the tool then notifies their Facebook friends. Millions of people used the tool to mark themselves safe following the recent attacks.
However, as soon as CEO Mark Zuckerberg applied the French tricolour filter to his display picture showing support for Paris, the social media sphere questioned the millionaire as to why the Safety Check feature was activated for Paris but not for Beirut where similar bombings took place just a day before.
Zuckerberg then explained, “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.”
Alex Schultz, Vice President of Growth, explained in a separate Facebook post that the tool's early version was first introduced in Tokyo during the Tsunami and nuclear disaster in 2011 and the modern version of the tool was issued most recently for earthquakes in Afghanistan, Chile and Nepal as well as Tropical Cyclone Pam in the South Pacific and Typhoon Ruby in the Philippines.
Elaborating further on the introduction of the tool for Paris, Schultz noted that after observing that a lot of activity was taking place on Facebook following the attacks, the team decided that there was more that could be added to the tool. Hence, the activation of the tool will now change the policy around Safety Check and when it is activated for other tragic incidents in the future.
Yesterday, we activated Safety Check in Paris so that people there could let their friends and family know they were...Posted by Facebook Safety on Saturday, November 14, 2015
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