Paris Shootings and Explosions Kill Over 100, Police Say

Facebook has enabled their safety check feature:

https://www.facebook.com/safetycheck/paris_terror_attacks/

What is this?

A way to let others know you're safe even if you can't get through to them personally.

Does that have any value beyond reinforcing people's irrational fear of mass deaths? What if you let your family know you're not one of the 100 killed in this attack then die as one of the 600 murdered in France each year by common crime?

I saw this happen with the London bombings. A colleague was almost in tears because her son lived in London and she couldn't contact him on the phone. It turned out he was fine, as approximately everybody else in the city was too.

There are more [geographical] disasters besides terrorist attacks. Tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, etc. where it's much more likely for broad swathes of people to be affected.

I found it valuable to know that my friends and family in Paris are safe, so I'm grateful to FB for doing that. OTH It saddens me and make me wonder what kind of world we live in for FB to release such a feature.

You didn't need Facebook to tell you that. You could have just assumed it was true based on the enormous population of Paris (2 million) and the small number of deaths in this incident (100-200).

It's a matter of geometry and not loading up the phone lines with un-necessary calls.

If 1,000,000 people try to figure out whether the 1 person they know in a city of 2,000,000 are ok within a very short time-frame then the phone network will stop functioning.

A place to post a simple 'I'm ok' will cut down tremendously on the number of calls that will then still need to be made. Unfortunately (1) not everybody has facebook and (2) a 'no show' will now certainly lead to a phonecall when before it would be assumed the person was ok so I'm not sure whether it helps or not but the basic idea is probably a good one. It would be even better if this functionality was available outside of having a facebook account.

You answered your question without even realizing it. It is always ok to care about your loved one, and it is always ok to reach back out to let them know you're ok, no matter the medium, no matter the circumstance. It is not irrational, it is human.

A college classmate on 9/11 died in the Windows of the World restaurant. Her death may be a statistic to you, but it is not to me.

I remember trying to call friends in NYC that day, all the exchanges were overloaded. I'm grateful that we now have ways to connect without worrying about possibly preventing emergency calls from going through.

You would have 0.01% chance of being wrong. How high would it need to be to warrant, in your eyes, checking if your family members are alive, instead of assuming they are? 0.1%? 1%? 10%? And why?

But Facebook only activates Safety Check on special occasions.

Which are extremely likely to be the same occasions where calls/emergency calls are not getting through.

It's still hands down the best feature of the entire product. I don't use Facebook for much, nor do I particularly care for it. But this is an amazing use of social graph and the internet. Whomever at FB came up with the concept, much respect.

A good friend of mine headed up this project when she was at FB. Natural disasters were exactly what they had in mind. We were in touch earlier this afternoon, and she said this was not a use case they had considered.

The world is full of a mean average of people who, believe it or not, do not run statistical analysis before deciding if they should care for their loved ones.

The world is full of real people, with real understandable concerns for their families and friends.

Not only that, but it isn't about the number who were killed anyway. It is about the probability of your friend being in that location at the time of the disaster which is much, much higher.

No one thinks 'I wonder if Jack was killed, he was at that park today'. They think 'I wonder if Jack was in the CBD, he works nearby!'

Statistically validated concerns or not, the very real effect of this part of human nature is that the phone infrastructure goes down and that sucks for everyone.

Several of my friends, neighbors and family members have died. In none of those cases did I hear about it on the news and call to make sure it wasn't them. If I did that, I'd be doing it daily, because there are always car accidents, murders, suicides, organ failures and cancers in any city every day.

So what I mean is that for a small incident like this, it's usually not reasonable to check on your friends. If they worked in the WTC on 9/11 then their risk is higher so it certainly can be reasonable. Similarly for a tsunami or other disaster with a high death toll.

Assuming that humans will behave rationally is, in itself, quite irrational

Did you read the post to which my reply was directed? I'm not addressing these questions to you or to one of the "people who do not run statistical analysis before deciding if they should care for their loved ones". I'm addressing these questions to someone who apparently does run statistical analysis.

Yes my apologies, I didn't realise I was commenting on the child comment. I was intending to reply to the comment you had replied to.

Good that you can stay so rational under emotional stress.

I would say that in that respect you are probably an outlier, and urge you to remember that facebook is designed for the mean.