Blog Post 5: Facebook after French Terrorism

After the ISIS attacks in Paris, France on November 13th, Facebook opened a feature on their social media site that allowed people in Paris to mark themselves safe. Once someone in Paris had marked themselves safe, it sent a notification to all of their friends letting them know that they were safe from harm. This feature was brilliant and was actually designed by Facebook in the event of a natural disaster. Facebook never planned to use this feature for a terrorist attack, but it was a quick response from Facebook that allowed them to mobilize this feature and put everyone’s nerves at ease. Within a few days of the attack on Paris, there were also attacks in Beirut, Lebanon and a few other locations in the Middle East such as Baghdad, Iraq. Facebook didn’t do anything for these horrible disasters though. And because of this, Facebook received a lot of backlash.

Facebook's website and mobile app with the Safety Check feature

In the United States, everyone feels the need to be constantly connected to everyone around them through the use of technology. One of the main ways that people do this is through the use of Facebook and other social media outlets like Twitter and Instagram. Facebook has an advantage over these companies, though. Facebook was able to capitalize on the number of members it has because of how early it came out. Facebook was the first of the major media outlets and now has 1.55 billion active monthly users.

A few limitations of Instagram and Twitter are the causes that so many people prefer Facebook to these other outlets. Instagram requires that you post a picture in order to post anything. While it’s nice to scroll through your feed and look at everyone’s pictures, it’s not always the most effective form of communication through social media. Twitter’s biggest downfall is the fact that you have to keep your tweets to a maximum of 140 characters. This is tough for a lot of people who want to write long posts, especially anything of political nature. Facebook has every feature that Instagram and Twitter has, and then some. With the ability to chat built into the service, the ability to post pretty much anything, and the ability to create groups for anything you’re involved in, Facebook has a lot more practical use for most people as compared to many other social media outlets.

However, this comes at a hefty price as well. Since Facebook has everything that other outlets don’t have, people expect that it will have everything they want. This causes issues for Facebook in times like the terrorist attacks in France, Lebanon, and Iraq among others. People lashed out at Facebook because of the filters that people could use on their profile pictures. They thought that it wasn’t fair for Facebook to choose to release a filter for France and completely disregard every other country. People also didn’t think it was fair that Facebook didn’t enable a feature which enabled users to mark themselves safe if they were close to the disasters in locations other than France. In ways, it’s understandable considering the largest usage is in first-world countries like the US, France, and other countries related to those. In the end, the safety check was a quick decision to help make sure people were safe, not to say that one set of lives mattered more than another. Facebook was also lucky because of how fast news changes now. With the rapidly changing stream of news that constantly bombards us, this whole issue blew over quickly and the bad PR that Facebook was receiving ended as quickly as it began.