Few weeks ago, residents of Lagos Island began to post pictures of flood in their areas – a development that has affected hundreds of houses and thousands of residents. The flood has been described as the city’s worst yet.
With the flood expanding to Lagos Mainland, many Facebook users were appalled by the social media giant’s refusal to switch on its Safety Check feature that allows individuals in the area to mark themselves as safe; others can also provide assistance to individuals in affected areas. This service is often activated when disasters happen in various parts of the world.
For many Lagos residents, the development suggested that the company may be less worried about what is happening in Lagos metropolis in comparison to the terrorist attacks in the United States, United Kingdom, and other parts of the world. But this is not in line with how Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, described the purpose of the service.
“When disasters happen, people need to know their loved ones are safe. It’s moments like this that being able to connect really matters,” he said in 2015.
So why has it not been activated for Lagos floods?
Investigation by TechCity revealed that Facebook relies on its third party global crisis reporting agency to gauge severity of events. Unfortunately, TechCity gathered that Facebook did not receive an alert for the Lagos Island/Mainland floods.
To set the record straight, here are the two things that need to happen for Facebook’s Safety Check to be activated:
First, global crisis reporting agencies, NC4 and iJET International, will alert Facebook that an incident has occurred and give it a title. Facebook will then begin to monitor for posts about the incident in the area.
Another thing is, if a lot of people are talking about the incident, they may be prompted to mark themselves safe, and invite others to do the same. After Safety Check has been activated people will see Community Help. They can find or give help and message others directly to connect from within Safety Check.
New updates
Last month, Facebook announced several updates to Safety Check including Fundraisers, Expanding Community Help on desktop and for all crisis types where Safety Check is activated; Adding more context with a personal note to allow people to share a personal note in their Safety Check News Feed story with friends and loved ones. The company also introduced crisis descriptions which offers more information about a crisis from NC4, Facebook’s trusted third party global crisis reporting agency.
“Safety Check has been activated more than 600 times in two years and has notified people that their families and friends are safe more than a billion times. Keeping the community safe means everything to us at Facebook and we hope that these updates to Safety Check continue to do just that,” said Naomi Gleit, Facebook’s VP Social Good.