Why Facebook activated Safety Check for Nigeria bombings

Amid alerts about tagged photos and event invitations, social media users might come across an update telling them that friends and family living in Nigeria are safe and sound.

Yesterday night’s bombing at a crowded lorry park in Yola, northeast Nigeria, was the first attack this month and left at least 32 dead and a few 80 others injured. A double suicide bombing in the Lebanese capital killed at least 43 people and wounded more than 200 others.

“During an ongoing crisis, like war or epidemic, Safety Check in its current form is not that useful for people: because there isn’t a clear start or end point and, unfortunately, it’s impossible to know when someone is truly ‘safe'”.

“After the Paris attacks last week, we made the decision to use Safety Check for more tragic events like this going forward”, Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post.

FB stock is up 2.51% Wednesday. Following the Paris attacks, Facebook is expanding its use to human disasters as well. It was also active after the recent earthquakes in Afghanistan, Chile and Nepal. “We’re now working quickly to develop criteria for the new policy and determine when and how this service can be most useful”, he added. The Paris attacks, however, marked the first time Facebook has activated the service for a human-caused atrocity rather than a natural disaster.

“We chose to activate Safety Check in Paris because we observed a lot of activity on Facebook as the events were unfolding”.

Facebook received criticism when it activated its Safety Check feature following the Paris terrorist attacks, but not following the terrorist attacks in Beirut. “In the middle of a complex, uncertain situation affecting many people”, Facebook Vice President Alex Schultz wrote in a Facebook post after the Paris events.

“Until [Friday], our policy was only to activate Safety Check for natural disasters”.

While Safety Check has been officially available for more than a year, the tool had its roots in the aftermath of the 2011 quake, tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan.

In Nigeria, two female suicide bombers killed 15 people when they blew themselves up at the entrance to a cellphone market in an attack in Kano on Wednesday, Agence France Presse reported.