Photograph — ireporteronline.com

Following the bomb blast that killed over 30 people and injured many others in Yola, Adamawa state, on Tuesday, Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, announced the site has activated the safety check feature for Yola residents. This attack comes a few days after President Buhari visited the state, boldly declaring that the war against Boko Haram is close to being over.

Zuck yola

Yola

The Safety Check feature was an innovative feature necessitated by the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that occurred in Japan in 2011. As a result of the extensive damage and displacement of people, family and friends turned to social media to connect with themselves and ensure that they were alive and safe. Inspired by this, Facebook’s engineers developed the Safety Check tool in order to make it easier to determine the state of well being of the people in the affected geographical area.

On October 16, 2014, the Safety Check feature, originally known as ‘Disaster Message Board’, was launched on Facebook for natural disasters. According to Zuckerberg, the feature is an easy and simple way of helping people in the Facebook community to ensure that their family and friends are safe. However, Safety Check has recently been modified, allowing it to be utilised in the wake of disasters concerning terrorist attacks going on all over the world.

Apart from Nigeria, the Safety Check Feature has been beneficial to three other countries – France, Nepal and Japan.

A bomb was detonated on Friday the 13th, while many were enjoying the first half of the football match between France and Germany at the Stade de France and similar explosions rocked several parts of the city around the same time, resulting in the death of about 129 people. In response to this Zuckerberg released a statement and mentioned the Facebook Safety Check was turned on for Paris, marking the first time the feature was used for a non-natural disaster.

Zuckerberg Paris

On April 25, 2015, Nepal was struck by an earthquake that killed about 9,000 people and injured several others. Facebook then activated Safety Check in the region, providing a brief synopsis of the event as well as emergency numbers. Facebook also identified users as possibly being in the affected area by the city listed on their profile and the place from which they had most recently accessed the social media site.

Zuck Nepal

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