Facebook Safety Check Feature Will Now Be Controlled By the Community

One of the useful features on Facebook is its Safety Check feature. Every time a disaster or catastrophe/violence occurs in a region or a city, Facebook sent you a message asking if you’re OK or not. It would then inform your friends and family on Facebook that you are OK and are not in danger.

Controlled by Facebook

This feature was controlled by Facebook, meaning that if a disaster occurred Facebook needed to monitor the community chatter in that area and check from verified accounts whether something is really happening in the specific region. It would then recognize it as a disaster and send the locals a message via Safety Check to verify if they are alright or not.

Now in Community’s Control

Now instead of Facebook monitoring and then triggering Safety Check after verification, the community will now be able to trigger it automatically. If enough people post about an incident in an area, Safety Check will now automatically trigger and ask the people who posted about the incident whether they are safe or not.

The users can then get their friends and family to do the same instead of Facebook sending the safety check message to the whole city or province (the incident could be small scale, limited to a city block for example).

facebook-safety-check-by-community

Facebook’s double standards for activating the tool

This could be a good thing with the community having more control over a useful tool like this. Facebook has received no shortage of criticism over choosing to activate Safety Check in some regions while ignoring others. After the Paris terror attacks Facebook activated the tool but did not activate it for similar attacks that occurred just a day before in Beirut and Lebanon.

This led to people calling out Facebook for having double standards with the way western countries look at other countries that have a reputation of man-made disasters and natural calamities, with Pakistan itself being a prime example.

With the tool now in control of the community this problem will be solved and the tool will now automatically trigger in response to posts by users in a region.

A techie, gamer, and Senior Editor at ProPakistani.



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