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.

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).