
Facebook’s Safety Check is a stress-inducing flip of social norms - imartin2k
https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/14/facebooks-safety-check-is-a-stress-inducing-flip-of-social-norms/
======
rabboRubble
I lived through a major natural disaster that left me an evacuee for months.
Facebook's safety check is the _only_ reason I haven't killed my account and
I've said this before in prior comments here on Hacker News.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14412146](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14412146)

Thank god the author hasn't lived through an event where _everybody_ you know
is affected by the event. The ability to say "I'm okay", say it once, and have
everybody you know on FB see it is a huge stress reducer. It cuts back on the
number of "are you okay?" messages you receive during the event when you may
not have a lot of battery or a lot of spare brain to dedicate to answering
lots of bullshit inquiries.

If he's feeling stressed out because of FB opening the "I'm okay" service in
that small area for that catastrophic fire, he's being a self centered jerk. I
guarantee that FBs service is helping some poor soul mixed up in that mess.

Edit: The Facebook safety check feature is not unique to Facebook. In many
ways it mimics Japan's disaster message board feature. Every teleco in Japan
offers this service:

[https://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/info/disaster/disaster_b...](https://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/info/disaster/disaster_board/)

I really think the author has lived too lucky a life in a place that has not
suffered overmuch from disasters. He can't see beyond his own narrow vision.

~~~
jdietrich
About 500 people were directly endangered by this incident. The Safety Check
alert seems to extend well beyond Greater London, so at least 9 million
people. That gives us an approximate false positive rate of 99.995%.

Is that reasonable or proportionate? Does it actually provide useful
information? Is it likely to quell unfounded fears and provide genuine
reassurance?

As tragic as this incident was, it affected a single building. Safety Check
might be a useful feature in some very specific circumstances, but it's
abundantly clear that Facebook is using it inappropriately. People hundreds of
miles from the incident are having their profiles show "not marked as safe".

The article makes a quite reasonable point - that Safety Check strongly
implies that "not safe" is the default, contrary to long-established social
norms. Unless used very carefully, this feature could cause completely
unnecessary fear; it is easy to envision a scenario where Safety Check could
prompt a dangerous mass panic.

If this is a genuine public safety feature, if Facebook really are using
Safety Check out of concern for their users welfare, then they should fully
accept the concomitant responsibility. They should expend real resources to
liaise with the relevant agencies and ensure that Safety Check is deployed
only when appropriate, that it is accurately targeted and that it helps rather
than hinders relief efforts.

If Facebook wish to rely on their usual excuses of "move fast and break stuff"
and "it's not our fault, it's the algorithm", then we should see Safety Check
in those terms - as a careless and cynical effort to boost engagement metrics.

~~~
btown
I have to disagree. "Not safe" became the default as soon as the concept of
social media hit; if there's the slightest chance you may have been affected
by an incident, anyone who would check your social postings to see if there
was any "word from you" would assume the worst in the absence of such a
posting. The human mind is evolved for both empathy and "what-if" scenarios,
but not for probability; it will snap to "what if my loved one was in that
apartment because they were in the country" rather than "it is highly
improbable." Given that, Safety Check actually _dampens_ those emotions on a
societal scale, by making it easier and more natural for each potentially-
endangered poster to assuage the fears of people in their circles.

~~~
jdietrich
Safety Check wasn't a carefully planned and considered effort by Facebook, it
was a hackathon project that went into production. There are many other ways
that Facebook could have responded to that issue. Given the size, influence
and profitability of Facebook, Safety Check seems extraordinarily half-assed.

I'm not in any way convinced that Safety Check does actually dampen fear. It
provides information of very poor quality ("not marked as safe" or "safe") in
a very poorly targeted way, without any kind of meaningful context. That kind
of uncertainty is rarely reassuring.

If Facebook took the issue seriously, they could easily address many of these
shortcomings. They could provide this kind of information in a relevant and
contextual way, counteracting the cognitive biases that lead us to worry. They
could deeply examine how social media can stoke fears and engineer reassurance
into the fabric of their network, rather than bolting on a crude alert system
that was hacked together in a weekend. I doubt that they will, because fear
and misinformation is clearly very profitable for them in all sorts of ways.

I'm reminded of the AMBER Alert system - a well-meaning but highly ineffectual
response that has greatly contributed to the climate of fear.

[http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0887403407302332](http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0887403407302332)
[http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0734016808316778](http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0734016808316778)

~~~
tzakrajs
It's almost like the person finder Google made, except it pushes itself on you
in an attempt to drive engagement.

------
whatevthrow31
Ok, I had to make a throwaway for this because apparently its a heated debate.

Why does everything Facebook do have to be so heavily criticized?

Safety Check is a wonderful feature. If I remember correctly, it started off
as an internal hackathon project that got turned into a full feature. They get
shit if they turn it on (here), and if they don't turn it on (past tragedies
where they failed to turn it on).

Why does everything Facebook do turn into a riot? After years in the industry,
95% of things that are "bad" that come out of big companies end up being well
meaning and just look malicious without context. Hanlon's razor is real.

Yeah, Facebook has to fund all this somehow. Yeah, they are going to make
their ad space extremely valuable with all the information they have. They
don't sell your raw data. They sell access to you like the rest of the
industry.

Those creepy ads that you saw based on some conversation you had? Turns out
that they're NOT listening to your mic or whatever. It's either confirmation
bias or something you're not thinking about.

Those friends that they suggest with a new account? Turns out your friends
posted pictures of you on Facebook, and Facebook knows how to do facial
recognition.

It feels like everything Facebook is overblown on HN. What am I missing?

Edit: I should have said this originally, but I'm a former Facebook employee,
now at another big tech company. I try not to be too controversial in writing,
which is why I made a throwaway.

~~~
fratlas
I agree with you up until the mic comment. I ran a few tests with friends. We
talked about _very_ obscure topics repeatedly (and nothing else) that we would
otherwise would have never messaged, and after scrolling 2 mins, targeted ads
appeared for those topics. Happened for multiple topics.

~~~
HalfwayToDice
It embarrasses me to see such conspiratorial nonsense on this website.

There are many reasons why such things happen: coincidence, someone google the
topic from the same router IP address, ad tracking on Googled websites, etc
etc

The idea that one of the worlds largest companies would risk their entire
business by secretly recording their users for ad revenue is absurd on almost
every level.

Yet some people on HackerNew, a forum that self-selects to a highly
educated/intelligent part of the community _actually believes it_.

It's mind-boggling.

~~~
fratlas
Not wearing my tin foil hat, just reporting what I found when I tried to test
it myself. Only our computers on the router, had never googled the topics.

~~~
seanp2k2
See my updated post just above. I just tried it with my Nexus 7 and saw
nothing around mic uploads. Install Fiddler and MITM your Facebook app and
repeat your experiment. I'm very curious to see if you find something
different from what I found.

------
ars
> However 97 are worryingly labelled “not marked as safe yet”.

That's the problem.

It should be a positive notification only, without any negative one. People
can say they are safe (I see value in that). But facebook should not say
anything at all if someone has not declared themself safe.

~~~
notahacker
This. And especially this when Facebook knows I'm active on my account 60
miles away, and has a huge amount of data that suggests I never had any
connection to that area, never mind the specific residential address the fire
took place in.

Facebook had a far more legitimate reason to publicly not mark me as safe from
an attack in a busy commuter area outside Borough Market a few days after I'd
visited it and used Whatsapp there, but I'll have to check whether a friend
asking me if I was alive (I was overseas with data turned off) was driven by
genuine or Facebook-UI-induced concern

------
bbarn
I've said it before here, and I'll say it every time it's relevant:

Stop using Facebook. Start telling your friends and family to do the same. As
the "smart computer person" in many people's lives, you can be the voice they
need to hear.

~~~
austenallred
What rationale could I possibly give someone to stop using Facebook that would
convince them to forgo all of the value they get from it?

~~~
naasking
Actual empirical studies that show they DON'T get any value from it, and that
it actually makes people more miserable on the whole?

~~~
dzjkb
I don't think people care about "empirical studies" telling them something
contrary to their own experience.

~~~
naasking
Right, because people still believe the sun revolves around the Earth.

------
onewaystreet
It wasn't long ago that Facebook was being criticized for _not_ enabling
Safety Check:

[https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/15/facebook-says-it-will-
enab...](https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/15/facebook-says-it-will-enable-
safety-check-in-more-human-disasters-following-criticism/)

>Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg committed to turning on Safety Check in more
human disasters going forward, responding to criticism that the company turned
on its safety feature for Paris but not for Beirut and other bombings.

~~~
bogomipz
The phrase "responding to criticism" appears twice in your link and "the
criticism" appears once. There are no sources for the actual criticism or
where it appeared, it's like an abstract thing. Such is Techcrunh

~~~
rabboRubble
Here is a case where FB was criticized for not turning on their safety check
feature. I've seen similar for events in Africa that went without FB's safety
check feature being turned on.

[http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/facebook-
criticised-...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/facebook-criticised-
over-paris-attack-safety-check-after-no-action-on-beirut-
bombing-a6735196.html)

Edit: Found the African event:

[https://qz.com/638428/facebook-is-being-criticized-for-
not-a...](https://qz.com/638428/facebook-is-being-criticized-for-not-
activating-safety-check-during-the-ivory-coast-attack/)

~~~
bogomipz
>"Lebanese blogger Joey Ayoub, who studies at the School of Oriental and
African Studies (SOAS) in London, wrote in a blog post on Saturday: “These
have been two horrible nights. The first took the lives of over 40 in Beirut,
the second took the lives of over 100 in Paris.

Mr Ayoub’s blog post has been shared over 10,000 times on Facebook, according
to Aljazeera."

One person sits down and takes the time to be thoughtful and compose actual
criticism. 10K do nothing but click a link to share it. Is that the same as
10,0001 individual criticisms?

------
clusmore
>But by making Safety Check a default expectation Facebook flips the norms of
societal behavior and suddenly no one can feel safe unless everyone has
manually checked the Facebook box marked “safe”.

I'm not buying this statement. Where is the evidence of this? The article
features two tweets from nondescript people stating they think the feature
spreads unnecessary fear, but features no tweets from people who actually felt
unnecessary fear. Are there any cases of people who felt afraid because their
loved ones didn't check in even though they could have? Otherwise to me this
argument is just speculation.

~~~
SeeDave
It's not speculation, in my opinion, because the "Safety Check" feature gives
the impression that every human being potentially affected by a terrorist
attack/natural disaster/unfortunate circumstance is completely and totally
unsafe (killed, raped, beaten, burned, and so on) lest they broadcast their
safeness to Facebook.

It's one thing to scream "FIRE!" in a crowded theater, but is it not equally
damaging to imply that loved ones are in danger lest they broadcast their
safety on your platform?

~~~
statictype
>It's not speculation, in my opinion

If its not speculation, then presumably there is some evidence of people
actually complaining about this?

The complaints are all of the form 'I think people may not like it because of
the following rational reasons' rather than 'I was in a disaster and failed to
mark myself as safe and all my family became worried about me unnecessarily '

For whatever its worth, I've been in disaster areas a couple of times -
Facebook asked me to mark myself as safe, I ignored it - and literally nothing
happened. Because when there's a disaster, people have better ways of
communicating their safety than posting on facebook.

------
protomyth
_Putting Safety Check activation in this protective, semi-algorithmic
swaddling means the company can cushion itself from blame when the feature is
(or is not) activated — since it’s not making case-by-case decisions itself —
yet also (apparently) sidestep the responsibility for its technology enabling
widespread algorithmic stress. As is demonstrably the case here, where it’s
been activated across London and beyond._

We would be much better off if we stopped accepting fake apologies and 'the
algorithm did it not us' excuses.

Facebook employees programmed this thing under, I assume, the direction of
management. This is Facebook's fault not some magic, wibly, wobly force. It's
one thing to have a bug, but this is working as specified.

~~~
aaron-lebo
Don't forget, FB's culture is to move fast and break things. That's ok when
you're breaking features, that's not acceptable when you are breaking social
norms, and that's what happens when they are so damn big.

They might be sorry, but you can dry a lot of tears with wads of cash. They
never see any real consequences for their mistakes.

------
toomanybeersies
I noticed this last night as well. Someone I knew checked in to say they were
ok. I looked at the news and saw that it was a building that housed 500
people, in one of the largest cities in the world.

It was the same recently when we had a storm in New Zealand, and they
activated safety check for the entire country. I don't think it even ended up
raining where I was at the time.

~~~
hueving
Do you have friends/family in remote countries? New Zealand is smaller than
California and when crap goes down in Southern California I still have people
asking me about it even though I live in Silicon Valley.

I can see the reasoning to just turn it on for all of New Zealand when it's
something as big as a hurricane.

~~~
pz4i
We live in Australia, and we had concerned family/friends on another continent
contacting us after the 2016 earthquake in New Zealand to see that we were OK.

So you are definitely on to something.

------
bogomipz
I find it disturbing that FB sees itself as the arbiter of which events and
what people are in need of alerting.

~~~
anigbrowl
I don't. For many people it's their primary communication platform, and things
like this are to a large extent driven by demand for such features in the wake
of previous tragedies/disasters, after setting up impromptu groups or check-in
mechanisms. It's not a simple problem to solve.

Now I don't think they're doing it very well and the fact that it's subject to
the typical feature creep is a problem, but then feature creep is a general
problem in software.

~~~
bogomipz
>"and things like this are to a large extent driven by demand for such
features in the wake of previous tragedies/disasters, after setting up
impromptu groups or check-in mechanisms"

Do you have a citation for this claim that 'FB is just answering the demand'?

>"It's not a simple problem to solve."

Who asked them to solve it?

~~~
anigbrowl
Because I've seen people using ad-hoc organizing strategies on social media
after previous disasters and and I've also seen people expressing desire for
features. People and companies don't need to be asked in formal terms to solve
problems, but often choose to offer tools in response to the a perceived
demand for such.

I'm not obliged to provide citations for every personal observation I make in
a short comment, or indeed in a long one. Try being less rude in future
interactions.

------
ceocoder
My cousin and his wife were in Nice on the day of attack in 2016, after
obsessively refreshing the page; seeing a green check mark next to their name
was the greatest sigh of relief.

Back in 2001, I was in India when one of the worst earthquakes to hit that
state in recent memory struck. I lived with my grandma and grandpa, and rest
of my family - mom, dad, sister, uncles, aunts, cousins were at a wedding. For
literally 7 hours we had no way of communicating with each other - they didn't
know if we made it or not.

So yeah, Safety Check tool is just fine in my book, just mere act of being
able to say "I'm OK" makes a massive difference.

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_Gujarat_earthquake](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_Gujarat_earthquake)

------
pcunite
Its all fun and games until FB starts taking over your sense of security, your
world view, and your life.

~~~
userbinator
FB has apparently realised that the safety/security argument is extremely
powerfully persuasive, and can be used not just to take away freedoms as is
usually the case, but to increase profits.

I am probably in the extremely small minority of individuals who don't think
of safety and security as a universal good, but as only one of many possibly
desirable properties to be weighted and contrasted with others.
Coincidentally, I also do not use FB.

~~~
oliv__
Yeah they're a little late to the party. Governments have been using this for
years.

------
ganonm
The main issue I have with this feature is that as far as I can tell there is
no way to opt out. I don't want this feature and I choose not to respond to
the notifications I occasionally receive when there is a terrorist event in my
city. That leaves me in a bind - unless I tell friends and family who use
Facebook that I'm actively choosing _not_ to use the feature, they invariably
begin to worry about me when I don't 'mark myself as safe'. This to me is
unacceptable.

------
ardacinar
That seems to be an abuse of the security check feature by Facebook's part. 6
mile radius for a fire in a ridiculously large city? As mentioned in other
comments, that feature can be very useful in cases of natural disasters or
large terror attacks that prompted the creation of this feature. (Although, to
be frank, living in Istanbul, it had become somewhat annoying to mark myself
safe every couple of weeks or so - though this is more directed towards the
Turkish government than Facebook)

------
wayanon
Glad to hear other people are bothered about this too. I wish there was a way
to opt out.

------
ivanhoe
So now people can't stand being "stressed" by a simple dialog asking them if
they wish to mark themselves safe? I'd understand if it's some business app
and you're in the middle of something important, but c'mon you're already
wasting your time looking at newsfeed? Is it really that hard and time
consuming to answer or just ignore that dialog? Or is it about emotions, you
don't like being reminded of the bad things happening in the real world around
you?!

------
bryanrasmussen
I like to complain about everything Facebook does as well as the next guy, but
in the rare case when they seem to have done something for promoting a social
good I'm going to give them a pass.

------
mxfh
If it's not about wide area disaster response, it's pretty much down to this:

 _We’d be better off checking in as ‘safe’ after our morning commute_

[http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/facebook-safety-check-
lo...](http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/facebook-safety-check-london-
bridge-terror-attack-a7772211.html)

------
phewvvg
I grew up in a town about 80 kilometers north of London and used to go there
pretty frequently, until I moved to Amsterdam last summer, so it was pretty
surprising when I opened Facebook yesterday evening and was asked if I was
safe from the fire in London.

I think Facebook's Safety Check is a good feature, but the implementation is
pretty dreadful.

------
Hattes
This reminds me of this Onion video: [http://www.theonion.com/video/millions-
irrationally-feared-d...](http://www.theonion.com/video/millions-irrationally-
feared-dead-in-minor-train-a-20901)

------
yladiz
I can kind of understand the vilification of this feature, and the reasons for
that are explained in other comments on this post, but I think it's a major
improvement to how it would have been before, and on other current platforms
as well. Unlike other ways to keep in touch with friends, like WhatsApp,
WeChat, Kakao, Facebook isn't just a messaging platform (although that's how I
primarily use it) and so it's actually possible to see someone marked as safe
without having to directly message them about it. This is a direct improvement
over other platforms where the only way you know if someone is safe is to
actually message them.

I don't really buy the argument that you would just assume someone is safe
before; you would absolutely have thw worry that if there was a disaster in
London, you would want to know if your friend is safe. Previously you couldn't
easily contact them, though: if you even had their phone number, calling them
internationally wouldn't be easy or sometimes even possible, but often you'd
have their address, and _hope_ they would respond to you. Now it's much easier
to keep in touch.

I also feel like people are making controversy over nothing when they think
that asking if they're safe when they're in London during that fire is too
much if they're not in the vicinity. Facebook is in a catch-22 here; Facebook
either knows your (roughly) exact location and knows if you were in or near
the apartment building at the time, which would make people cry about Facebook
tracking you everywhere, or it doesn't and it asks if you're safe if you're in
London. Even in the image from the tweet that this article references there is
a "Not in the area" button you can press. There's really no way to correctly
do this without having really accurate and very up to date information about
the people using Facebook, which isn't always possible.

Could Facebook improve the ways it determines if a user is in the area? Yes,
of course; a simple way would be to look up IP address block(s) and see if the
user is in a block they look up, then prompt them, although it's not really
that simple. I also run into issues with Facebook thinking I'm in Japan when
I'm not, even though I left nearly a month ago. Facebook really could also
improve the UI around it; the point at the bottom of the article when it says
that the writer has 100 (probably) London based friends, 97 of which are not
"marked as safe", which is terrible UI. But I do absolutely disagree that this
feature is worth removing based on the arguments presented in this article.

~~~
_jal
> I don't really buy the argument that you would just assume someone is safe
> before

The problem is that it doesn't matter how _you_ react to the feature. The
problem is how groups of people react to it.

This isn't much different than saying you'd calmly walk to the exit if caught
in a fire in a club. Even assuming you evaluate your own behavior in that
situation correctly, it has zero effect on everyone else.

> There's really no way to correctly do this without having really accurate
> and very up to date information about the people using Facebook, which isn't
> always possible.

So maybe if you can't do something reliably, and there are risks to getting it
wrong, the proper response isn't 'hold my beer?'

~~~
yladiz
> So maybe if you can't do something reliably, and there are risks to getting
> it wrong, the proper response isn't 'hold my beer?'

Is the argument that this shouldn't be done because it can't be perfect?

~~~
_jal
No, it is not. I meant what I wrote.

~~~
yladiz
Let me put it another way: I don't understand your argument, so I clarified
and asked if your argument was X. You said it's not, so what is your argument?

~~~
_jal
The argument is that, based on the news reports, the system breaks often
enough to risk causing more panic and alarm than it solves, so instead of
doubling down on a bad idea, perhaps the right course of action is to
reconsider the feature.

You seemed to want my argument to be some absurdly rigid form of "ship only on
perfect performance". It isn't - it is more that treating misfires and the
predictable, if irrational, responses something like this will generate in
actual emergencies as if they were as trivial as, say, bad ad targeting is
irresponsible and should be given substantially more thought.

------
markatkinson
I live in Cape Town, South Africa and we had a storm that was a bit worst than
usual. I don't have facebook but someone told me the Safety Check came up for
them during the storm 0_0.

Sounds like a neurotic grand mother.

------
zebraflask
I view it as an invasion of privacy. It's not Facebook's job to do things like
that. All it accomplishes is to act like a megaphone to artificially amplify
the significance of the story (insert comparisons to Fox News and tabloids
here). I'm sure there could be endless debates about the propriety of doing
that, but from my perspective, spreading bad news to encourage user hysteria,
mostly for the sake of reinforcing platform loyalty, is ethically very
questionable.

In any event, Facebook these days is only useful anymore as a convenient login
mechanism for sites that use the Facebook login widget, and even there,
Google's version works better.

------
kylegordon
This particular instance of the safety check was utterly ridiculous and
pointless. My wife and a friend were prompted to 'Mark as safe', except we
both were in Glasgow.

Over 400 miles away.

~~~
aembleton
Have you been in London recently? I think the safety check algorithm must look
at your location history for the last n days and ask you if you've recently
been in the area.

I live in Manchester, but was in Bali when the bomb went off last month. I got
the safety check. This made sense as my friends might not have been aware that
I was away, and so it was useful for them to be alerted that I was safe.

------
wutbrodo
> Those same friends would likely not have even thought to consider there was
> any risk prior to the existence of the Facebook feature.

This article is cynical clickbait nonsense, right down to assuming that it's
impossible for Facebook to implement something for any reason but engagement.
I'm no fan of Facebook but the idea that, to a man, they're faceless stock
price maximizers is just stupid and frankly insulting.

I know plenty of people who immediately think of (and often call)
family/friends in an affected area when a disaster happens. Depending on how
far away it is, it can even be at the level of a city.

------
weirdshape
I can't really relate to people who who clamber to push out notifications to
their friends and family about the minutiae of their lives.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
The important thing is that you got to be smug about it.

------
dkarapetyan
Facebook is training rats in a maze. At least the theory is the same. So the
question then is, are you a rat in a maze?

------
wayanon
Is it possible to opt out of Safety Check?

------
lngnmn
Doesn't social norms depend upon location, community, and culture?

Hipster's demand to respect that shallow outward sophistication they cosplay
cannot be considered as a universal standard.

For most people there is nothing stress-inducing. Merely boring stuff.

