Facebook throws a disaster lifeline
Safety Check, activated by users for wide coverage, assures friends and co-workers during emergencies
Luca Menna was jolted awake around 3:30 a.m. Wednesday as a 6.2-magnitude earthquake rattled his apartment in Rome.
His bed shook for more than a minute. Car alarms went off. Panicked, Menna got dressed and headed to a nearby park. Through a tool on Facebook called Safety Check, he instantly notified his friends and co-workers on the social network that he was safe.
“It was one of the first things that I did,” said Menna, a 42-year-old social media strategist. “It’s a really useful tool, especially for a large community that’s really big like Rome.”
Started in 2014 during Typhoon Ruby in the Philippines, Safety Check has been activated for more than 50 catastrophes worldwide this year, up from 11 in 2014 and 2015 combined. The tool was originally designed as a way for members to post that they survived natural disasters, but its use has since
“The biggest concern was that people felt that Facebook was neglecting certain regions of the world. This takes all that decision-making out of the hands of Facebook.” Timothy Coombs, Texas A&M University professor who teaches crisis communication
expanded to terrorist attacks, including the mass shooting in June at an Orlando nightclub.
As the tool became more popular, however, it stirred controversy. Critics noted that while Facebook activated Safety Check for the Paris terrorist attacks in November, it had not done so for deadly bombings in Beirut a day earlier. Nor was Safety Check initiated during al Qaeda-linked shootings in Ivory Coast in March. And so, in response to the criticism, Facebook recently began allowing its own members to activate the tool, in effect outsourcing the decision about what makes for a disaster of sufficient proportions.
“The biggest concern was that people felt that Facebook was neglecting certain regions of the world,” said Timothy Coombs, a Texas A&M University professor who teaches crisis communication. “This takes all that decision-making out of the hands of Facebook.”
The new policy has been in place since June. Now, if Facebook receives notification of an emergency from a verified third party, like a government official or first responder, and a large percentage of Facebook users in the same geographic region also post about it, the social network allows its users to activate the Safety Check tool. They can mark themselves as safe and ask their friends in the area if they are safe. Facebook users have turned on the tool for events including a fire in the Madeira Islands, a bridge collapse in India and, more recently, flooding in Louisiana, disasters that have deeply impacted those communities but may get limited coverage from major news outlets.
“We’ve actually taken something that was previously Facebook-driven and made it much more driven by friends,” said Peter Cottle, a Facebook software engineer who helped create the tool.
The idea behind Safety Check began in 2011. Facebook engineers in Japan created an online message board for people impacted by a 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami, making it easier for them to communicate about their safety on the social network. The idea of using Facebook as a way for people to reach family and friends in emergencies resurfaced in 2013, after Cottle became worried about co-worker Eric Giovanola, who was running the Boston Marathon, and wondered if he was hurt in the bombing. A friend of Giovanola’s had posted that the runner was safe, but not all of Giovanola’s friends saw the post because the friend had only posted it on his Facebook page, Cottle said.
Cottle envisioned a tool that would make it easier for people to find out whether their friends were safe. But the task was different from his day job at Facebook — building tools for marketers to place ads on the social network.
Cottle, product manager Sharon Zeng and a team of engineers got their chance to showcase their idea at a company hackathon, a 72-hour event in which employees were challenged to build a prototype of a Facebook product and get feedback. Over cans of Red Bull and kung pao chicken in December 2013, Cottle’s team worked on a mobile and desktop prototype of their idea.
“We saw why it should exist, and that was the passion that drove us,” Cottle said.
A prototype was introduced five months later among Facebook employees in Menlo Park. As soon as Safety Check was turned on, hundreds of staffers marked themselves as safe, as part of a test. In December 2014, Facebook introduced the tool for the first time to all of its users during the Philippine typhoon — an event deemed of sufficient scale, scope and duration to merit its use.
“It was one of those products you can’t really test before you launch it,” said Marcy Scott Lynn, who manages Facebook’s global policy programs. “This was the first event that met our criteria.”
Safety Check was well-received by some emergency experts, and Facebook went on to use the tool for other natural disasters, including this year’s earthquake in Taiwan and last year’s Nepal earthquake.
One of the biggest issues in managing disasters is freeing up communication lines for first responders and the government, said Dianna Bryant, an associate professor of crisis and disaster management at the University of Central Missouri.
“Any app that provides a quick and easy way that doesn’t tie up a lot of bandwidth is a great way of reassuring people that you are safe,” Bryant said.
In 2015, bombings and mass shootings took place in Paris, and Facebook was lit up with comments by members concerned about their friends’ safety. The program’s managers decided to expand Safety Check beyond its original scope.
“There were a lot of discussions at all levels of the company,” Lynn said. “The decision was made to do it.”
But once the tool also applied to terrorist attacks, people started questioning why Facebook seemed to turn on the tool mostly for attacks in the West. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook would work to address those situations.
“You are right that there are many other important conflicts in the world,” Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook. “We care about all people equally, and we will work hard to help people suffering in as many of these situations as we can.”
But there are still some kinks to work out. Caroline Schneider, an instructor at Louisiana State University who used Safety Check during the flooding, says she wishes that in addition to a quick notification that her friends are safe, she could learn in a succinct way how she can help them without fishing through their Facebook posts. And Laurel Ann Whitlock, a 30-year-old social media coordinator in Orlando, wonders if there might be too many Safety Check notifications in the future, diminishing its importance.
“If it gets overused, it won’t have the same impact as it has right now,” said Whitlock, who marked herself as safe during the Orlando terrorist attack this year. “We have to figure out what the level of saturation is before we stop paying attention to it.”
Facebook says it is monitoring how its community-generated Safety Check tool fares and will make adjustments as needed. For Menna in Rome, the wish list includes having more people pay attention to the feature, instead of just those his age. A day after the earthquake struck, he called his parents. They hadn’t seen his Safety Check post.
“The tool is amazing, but the people that actually use this type of tool in Italy (that I know) honestly is few,” he said.
“Any app that provides a quick and easy way that doesn’t tie up a lot of bandwidth is a great way of reassuring people.” Dianna Bryant, associate professor of crisis and disaster management, University of Central Missouri