Leveraging Social Media in a Time of Tragedy: Discovering Facebook’s “Safety Check” Feature in the Wake of the Lahore Bombing

This past weekend, I watched news coverage of more than 70 women and children killed and hundreds injured due to a suicide bombing that took place in a park that I played in during summer and winter vacations to Pakistan as a child. (See http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/28/asia/pakistan-bombing-lahore/ for more details).

Although Lahore, Pakistan is almost 7000 miles away from Cambridge, I immediately felt panicked. My first instinct was to pick up the phone and call every family member that I could — my parents have several siblings still living in Lahore as do many of my cousins — who have been like siblings to me — still live and work in Lahore. (In fact, some live close by to the park, and routinely go there to take evening strolls). While I struggled to get through to family by phone to find out if they were affected, I was surprised — but grateful! — to learn of a Facebook feature called “Safety Check” and have included a screen shot of the feature below.

Although I was personally unaware of the “Safety Check” feature, I have been told by friends that it has been used in other unfortunate tragedies including the Paris attacks last November. To say that the feature is a blessing is an understatement. I was immediately able to see which family members had checked in as safe and was able to mobilize my family members (particularly those who were more technologically savvy) to continue checking off our loves ones as they learned of their safety. This helped to inform our extended family living in the United States of their loved ones’ safety and provided assurance in a time of grief and panic, when it was otherwise difficult to get a hold of one another through phone lines.

This post is part of a blog series for a Social Media Management course that I am taking at MIT Sloan School of Management. For this blog, we were asked to find fun and/or surprising examples of social media in the world, to explain the context in which we encountered it, and why it caught our attention.