Safety Check a feature that was launched in 2014, allows Facebook users to notify friends that they are safe in case of any natural disasters and violent attacks that might happen – such as; Bombings, Floods, Earth Quarks, to mention a few. The feature was used for the first time in the United States last year after a gunman massacred 49 people at a nightclub in Orlando, Florida.
On Wednesday, Menlo Park-based social networking firm, Facebook Inc. announced new updates to make its Safety Check feature more useful and more helping. One of them is to allow Facebook users to raise and donate money, in other word 1. Fundraise using the feature, to make it easier for people affected by natural disasters and violent attacks to receive help. However, the Fundraising Tool in Safety Check will roll out in the coming weeks in the United States, Facebook said in a blog post.
Facebook also said its 2. Community Help feature, which helps people affected by disasters find each other locally to provide and receive assistance, and also currently available only iOS and Android Facebook apps, would soon be available on desktop and for all crisis types where Safety Check is activated.
The Safety Check feature also will receive the update of 3. Adding More Context With a Personal Note which will allow people to share a personal note in their friends more about what’s happening from within the Safe Check feature. The note will appear in the News Feed story that is automatically generated when people mark themselves safe.
And finally, 4. Introduced Crisis Descriptions a feature that will provide more information about a crisis from NC4; Facebook trusted third party global crisis reporting agency, within the Safety Check tool. This feature was introduced because when people receive Safety Check notifications, they may have limited information about the crisis.
“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,” Naomi Gleit, VP Social Good writes in a Facebook blog post.[related-posts]
Notably, according to reports by Reuters, Facebook also activated the Safety Check feature for users in London on Wednesday following a fire in a housing block that killed at least six people and injured more than seventy. It also made the tool available earlier this month following deadly attacks on London Bridge.
Editor’s Note: These features will be available to US citizens first before coming to countries where the Safety Check feature has been activated.
