You know the drill by now: a terrorist atrocity or catastrophe occurs in your home town, and no sooner have you seen the news than you receive a Facebook notification that one of your friends has marked themselves safe, or that another is asking you to do so.
This was my experience during the attack in Westminster in March, with friends as far away as Canada asking me to declare myself “safe”. Clicking on Facebook’s nagging notification revealed 31 of my friends were apparently out of danger, but a further 249 were “not marked as safe”.
Since it was first launched in 2014, Safety Check has become an increasingly important part of the way Facebook would like to see itself: as the big benign blue entity that wants to protect you, its citizen.
But Safety Check has proven controversial. It was turned on for the Manhattan truck attack that killed eight on Halloween. Although terrible, the scale of the danger was similar to the one in Westminster, leading New Yorkers to question whether the functionality should even have been turned on.
Source: www.theguardian.com
The Power of #SocialMedia even in times of #Atrocity