Facebook Safety Check : Putting the “social” and “community” back into social community

In 2004 a natural disaster rocked the Indian ocean and surrounding countries. However its effects were felt beyond the literal tremors of the earth and physical devastation. Families around the world arose on boxing day to horrifying news, as reports came in there was a panic to locate friends and loved ones who might have been caught up in the disaster. For some, days of uncertainty stretched on and on. If you were lucky you would get a call from a stranger saying your relative was safe and sound. In 2015 an equally harrowing disaster has struck the small country of Nepal. This column is not the platform to go into excessive detail around the devastation, but what is quickly becoming clear is that many are missing. However, this hellish wait experienced by those in 2004 has been mitigated in 2015 by a very simple use of social media. Facebook have launched “Safety Check” – a simple way to say you’re safe and check on others – which was activated on Saturday in large parts of Nepal as well as areas in Bangladesh, India and Bhutan. Since then, millions of people have been marked safe and tens of millions of people were notified that someone they know has been marked safe. Not only does this put people’s minds at rest, but it also has the possibility of mapping the largest black spots (those areas with the least “safety checks”), giving the emergency services a guide on where they are best needed. In an age of social media becoming commercial to the point of saturation and it becoming a platform for narcissism to the point of nausea, it is refreshing and indeed heartening to see Facebook being used in way that is of genuine use to the world.

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