Safety Check: is Facebook becoming fear’s administrator-in-chief?

This year, Facebook turned on its notification function for attacks in London and Las Vegas, Stockholm and St Petersburg. But do we feel more secure?

You know the drill by now: a terrorist atrocity or catastrophe occurs in your home town, and no sooner have you seen the news than you receive a Facebook notification that one of your friends has marked themselves safe, or that another is asking you to do so.

This was my experience during the attack in Westminster in March, with friends as far away as Canada asking me to declare myself "safe". Clicking on Facebook's nagging notification revealed 31 of my friends were apparently out of danger, but a further 249 were "not marked as safe".