Facebook has opened Safety Check for residents in Nairobi after the horrifying Riverside Drive attack that happened today in the afternoon.
Facebook’s Safety Check is a feature the company released some years back that allows you to mark yourself as ‘safe’ and automatically share it to your News Feed so that your friends and family can rest easy.
In this part of the world, Safety Check is usually not enabled automatically. We can attribute this activation to one Mark Kaigwa who in a tweet said that he emailed senior African Facebook execs to enable it for crisis response.
Well they did it and you can use the feature if you click through this link.
It will ask you whether you are in the affected area and if you click ‘yes’, it will prompt you to inform your friend that you are safe. If you are, click the ‘I’m Safe’ button and if you’re not, click the ‘Doesn’t Apply to Me’ button.
You can also find out whether you can mark yourself by checking out your News Feed right now. There is a possibility that someone has marked his/herself as safe and you can click the link provided to do that too.
This feature is vital for both parties as it informs your friends and family that you are safe and in turn you can see whether your friends and family are safe during a tragedy. The last time Facebook activated safety check in Kenya is when we had flash floods and people used the feature to mark themselves as safe.
