Facebook to enable 'community-activated' Safety Check in over 80 countries
Facebook is changing the way it activates its Safety Check feature, which allows people to let friends and family know they are safe in the event of a natural or human disaster.
The social giant is rolling out a new feature that will enable future Safety Checks to be “community-activated”; meaning that they will be triggered based on local trends created by users instead of being manually switched on by Facebook employees.
The revamped service will be available in 80 languages, and an added development will suggest groups for people affected by the crisis, which could be used to help people find shelter or food.
The move follows criticism levied at the company last year after it was accused of ‘western bias’ for switching on Safety Check during the Paris terrorist attacks last November, but not using it in the event of other crisis’ such as bombings in Beirut in which 43 people were killed.
At the time Mark Zuckerberg promised that the service would be used more for disasters across the world, asserting: "We care about all people equally, and we will work hard to help people suffering in as many of these situations as we can.”
Facebook software engineer and Safety Check creator Peter Cottle said of the change: “We needed an approach that could handle this range of population sizes with both accuracy and speed, but also remain rock-solid and ready to launch at a moment’s notice.
“As our efforts ramped up, the team began solving the technical challenges associated with more consistent and frequent activations.
“In order to create a system that we can launch anywhere at a moment’s notice, we scaled our infrastructure to handle larger events more efficiently and automated many of the manual steps previously required for activation.”
The new effort is more algorithm-centric and requires Facebook users to provoke conversation around events in affected regions before being prompted to use Safety Check. Another update will let fellow users who are worried about people they know to invite other friends to mark themselves as ‘safe'.