Facebook has turned on its Safety Check feature yet again, post yesterday's attacks in Nigeria. Atleast 32 people were killed and dozens were wounded in Nigeria yesterday after a bombing in the Nigerian city of Yola. Facebook users near the site of the bombing in Nigeria will be asked to mark themselves safe, once they log on to their accounts. With this, Facebook's safety check feature has surfaced on the platform twice in a span of Five days. Last Friday, the social networking giant had deployed the same safety tool during the terrorist attacks in Paris.
While the 'Safety Check' tool was widely used by Facebook users during the Paris attacks, it also recieved a lot of flak from other users who called the company's actions biased, because of its inability to activate the feature during the Beirut bombings. Commenting on the backlash, Facebook management had assured users through posts that they will start deploying the safety tool at a much wider scale. “We just changed this (safety feature policy) and now plan to activate safety check for more human disasters going forward as well,” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a post, a few days earlier.
With the inclusion of the Nigerian Bombing, Facebook seems to be living up to its word, but the company still needs to work towards including a much wider base of human disasters. There were no safety checks deployed during the recent flood in Chennai, India, which killed almost 70 people, with more still trapped in water logged areas.