Facebook Safety Check
Facebook Safety Check is a feature managed by social networking company Facebook. The feature is activated by the company during natural or man-made disasters to quickly determine whether people in the affected geographical area are safe.
The feature was developed by Facebook engineers, inspired by people's use of social media to connect with friends and family in the wake of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. Originally named the Disaster Message Board, it was renamed to Safety Check prior to release. It was introduced on October 15, 2014. Its first major deployment was on Saturday, April 25, 2015, in the wake of the April 2015 Nepal earthquake. The tool was deployed again in the wake of the May 2015 Nepal earthquake, during Pacific Hurricane Patricia in October 2015, and during the November 2015 Paris attacks, the latter being the first time the tool was used in response to a non-natural disaster. On March 22, 2016, during reports of explosions at an airport and train station in Brussels, the feature was turned on again, but there was a delay in turning it on after it was revealed it was a suicide bomber attack.
On June 2, 2016, Facebook announced that it would start experimenting with community-activated Safety Checks. With the new system, Safety Check would be activated based on combination of a certain number of people posting about a particular crisis plus an alert from one of Facebook’s third-party sources. Users would also be able to share and spread the word about the Safety Check once it was activated. Facebook hoped the changes would lead to more consistent, frequent, and streamlined deployments around the world.
On February 8, 2017, Facebook introduced a Community Help feature to the Safety Check crisis response tool. It allows users can search through categorized posts, get assistance to from locals nearby and connect with providers over Facebook Messenger. In June 2017, Facebook announced several updates to Safety Check, including the Community Help feature coming to desktops. It was also made possible for users to start fundraisers from within Safety Check.
On Saturday, April 25, 2015, an earthquake struck Nepal, with an estimated loss of a few thousand lives. Within a few hours of the earthquake hitting, Facebook had activated Safety Check in the region. It identified users as possibly being in the affected area by their current city as listed on their profile, as well as the place from which they had most recently accessed Facebook. The desktop version of Safety Check also provided a brief synopsis of the event and emergency contact numbers.
...
Wikipedia