After Criticism, Facebook Activates ‘Safety Check’ for Nigeria

Facebook Inc has activated its “Safety Check” feature, after deadly blasts in Nigeria late on Tuesday.

Due to these violence, Facebook has made a decision to activate its safety check feature after the Nigeria bombing.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the Paris events were the catalyst for this new policy, and admits Facebook can’t and won’t be able to bring Safety Check to bear for every crisis.

The move was met with criticism from a few quarters with many questioning why the company had not enabled the feature for other terrorist attacks, like the bombings in Beirut. Just recently, Paris, France experienced a terrorist attack as well as Beirut and Nigeria. Following the Paris attacks, Facebook is expanding its use to human disasters as well. As a result of the extensive damage and displacement of people, family and friends turned to social media to connect with themselves and ensure that they were alive and safe.

Facebook had activated the Safety Check feature for the fifth time in the past year, though as Zuckerberg points out, the first time was for a non-natural disaster.

The Safety Check feature was an innovative feature necessitated by the Tohoku quake and tsunami that occurred in Japan in 2011. Caught in the crossfire of trying to do something good but doing it under a perceived Western bias, Facebook has now activated Safety Check again after the bombing of a market in Nigeria. But moving forward, Facebook will address human conflicts as well.

– Dumi Mdluli (@DumiMdluli) November 18, 2015 Now we sit & wait for Facebook’s safety app for #Yola or perhaps the option to put #Nigeria’s flag as profile pic?

Zuckerberg also added, “Until yesterday [the day of the Paris attacks], our policy was only to activate Safety Check for natural disasters”. Activating the second feature would overlay the profile picture of the user with the three colours of the French flag to show their solidarity with the victims of the terror attack.

“So far we have recorded 32 dead bodies and 80 others sustained injuries”, Saad Bello, the coordinator of the relief organization in Adamawa state, said on Wednesday.