March 22nd, 6:56 AM -- my phone suddenly starts buzzing, stacking up 7 notifications in a row, all of them aunts and cousins being "marked safe". This could be a confusing, even terrifying experience for some, but it wasn't my first: I first received Facebook's "marked safe" message from a family member in Chile during a 2015 earthquake. But this was different: it was coming from family in Brussels, of all places, with whom I had spent the entire past week during spring break. It couldn't have been a natural disaster, not following the events in Brussels just days earlier. That Tuesday morning, two bombs went off in the Brussels Airport, and one more in the Maelbeek metro stop.
In today's world, Facebook told me about an international terrorist attack before CNN did. My loved ones told me they were safe before I ever knew they were in danger.
Only four days prior, I was at that very ticket counter, boarding for my own flight. Days before that, I was at the Maelbeek metro station, too, visiting a friend in Brugge on my birthday.
And now those beautiful and bustling places had been destroyed, and many innocent lives lost. But knowing my own family - especially my cousin, whose flight was later on the day of the attack - was safe brought me beyond fear, to gratitude for their wellbeing. Countless others were in the same position as me, wondering about the fate of their husbands, mothers, nieces, colleagues, or airport staff - and many of them received the "marked safe" notification soon after, putting their trauma at some ease.
But what if this crises had happened before Zuckerberg and his friends decided to make a website in their dorm? How would I have known that my cousins miles and miles away were safe? Of all the features and things Facebook provides, the safety check feature is by far its most important.
What is Facebook's Safety Check?
Facebook introduced the safety feature in October of 2014. Influenced by disaster message boards that were created by the community as early 2011, following the Japanese earthquake and following tsunami, Facebook has rolled out the feature to all 1.6 billion Facebook users.
The first time the safety check feature was turned on was in wake of the Nepal earthquake in April of 2014. The Paris attacks this past November represented the first non-natural disaster cause of the deployment of the feature, but since then other terrorist incidents that triggered the feature include Boko Haram, Ankara, and of course the Brussels attack this week.
How does Facebook's Safety Check Work?
When a crisis occurs (typically a natural disaster or a terrorist incident), Facebook essentially turns on the Safety Check feature and, using your location, Facebook can tell if you would have been affected by the disaster.
It then provides a dual service: you select the option to mark yourself as safe, and also notifies you when your friends are marked safe. Though I wasn't in the affected areas, Facebook knew to inform me that my cousins in Chile were safe during the 2015 earthquake, and that my cousins in Brussels weren't directly hurt by the attack, despite the fact that I was nowhere near the affected area.
In addition, Facebook provides a search bar to check in on friends in affected regions, letting you confirm if all is right with your friends and family, or if they have not yet marked themselves as unaffected.
Facebook has now announced that they will not “announce” every time the safety check feature will be turned on as - sadly - it used more often than we all wish. The one criticism of the feature has been that it is less favorable towards less developed nations where not everyone may have a mobile device and connections may be bad especially after a disaster.
During the Nepal quake, my friend received notifications of her loved ones over a course of a few days, while the Brussels alert notified me of my family's situation within minutes of the incident. Speed aside, the impact of the feature is clear: during the Nepal earthquake, more than 7 million people in the area were marked safe notifying over 150 million friends around the world of their safety.
September 11th: Tragedy in the Time Before Facebook
Since social media is now over a decade old, it's easy to forget just how the world reacted to disasters prior to the spread of our vast networks: there was no call to the massive social graph to ask if our loved ones were safe, for one - and I remember it clearly.
I was 7 years old on September 11th, 2001, the day New York was attacked. I remember that morning vividly, as much of my family lives in New York City, and my dad was to fly home that same day from nearby Boston, Massachusetts. I remember I didn't go to school that day: my mom was busy attempting to call my dad and each family member to make sure they were OK.
In wake of 9/11, posters of loved ones covered Lower Manhattan for months, with phone numbers asking to call with any information if found. I am truly grateful that, today, these posters are not necessary, and only wish the victims of 9/11 and their families could have had this tool in their time of need.
The bottom line is this: Facebook again has fundamentally changed the way we communicate, but this time in a more profound and important way than sending a GIF to your BFF. Today, we don’t need to wait by the phone hoping our loved ones answer, hanging in suspense if we'll get to talk to them again.
In this world, Facebook told me about an international terrorist attack before CNN did. My loved ones told me they were safe before I ever knew they were in danger.
The “marked safe” does not take away from the pain of the news headlines, the pictures of mass destruction, or the tragic number of casualties; however, it provides us with the relief in a matter of seconds of what used to take hours to days to weeks of knowing that those that matter most to us are okay.