But many quickly pointed out that only a day before a double suicide bombing in Beirut left 43 people dead and 250 injured.
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Zuckerberg then explained, “Until yesterday, our policy was only to activate Safety Check for natural disasters”.
“We’ve activated Safety Check, so if you’re in Paris you can mark yourself safe or check on your friends and family”.
Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook, has said previously: “Over the last few years there have been many disasters and crises where people have turned to the Internet for help”.
However, few people raised question as to why Facebook didn’t do the same for attacks in Beirut and other places. “You are right that there are many other important conflicts in the world”, wrote Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in his own post.
Considering that Facebook made a decision to use the feature for a terrorist attack, it’s interesting to see what other events will activate the feature.
The Facebook “Safety Check” feature allows users to instantly check-in as safe, so that all their friends know they’re alright.
According to Facebook Vice President of Growth Alex Schultz, the website created Safety Check in the aftermath of the March 2011 nuclear disaster and tsunami in Japan. We talked with our employees on the ground, who felt that there was still a need that we could fill.
Its activation on Friday night was the first time it had been activated for a disaster setting that was non-natural.
But why wasn’t the feature available during other terrorist attacks? And if you have friends in the area, you’ll get a notification about any Facebook friends that have marked themselves as safe.
When a friend uses the “causes” feature in Facebook to customise their profile picture, it should appear in your Facebook news feed.
Facebook is used by more than 1.5 billion people around the world every month – 83 percent of whom live in countries outside the US and Canada, the company says.
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Facebook also added an option for users to add a French flag overlay to their profile image; there was no Lebanese overlay on Thursday.
