Should Facebook be Mandatory? *For Safety Reasons

With the recent Paris Attacks, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook have made it apparent that they will use the Safety Check feature in times of human disaster as well as natural disaster. Because of this decision, this feature has become more known by Facebook’s vast community. Though there may have been some controversy with when Facebook decides what is a true human disaster and when to deploy it, this feature should not be taken lightly and should be noted for its great service. It is by far the easiest and quickest way to let a large group of people know you are safe, and when tons of people are probably messaging you questioning about your situation, it is the simple reply all. From personal experience, it was nice to know that my friends in Paris were safe, when they were too busy to respond to my texts. 

Looking towards the future, this feature could be used and maybe should be used by governments to keep track of their citizens in times of disasters. The Safety Check feature created this large database of people who were safe in Paris by using a crowd sourcing-like program. If this is as effective and efficient as it seems to be, could there be a more governmental control over the system? Or could Facebook work with these governments and share the information they gather with them? I understand that privacy is a big issue when it comes to new media, and most people are not always happy to know that their information is being shared to companies to better target them; however, in my opinion, this is something that is beneficial to the public and should not see as invasive or harmful. Before computers, it was very hard to know if a friend was safe in times of tragedy and you would not have gotten that immediate response and would have been left to worry in the unknown longer. 

Moving more into the future, as social and new media take even more over our lives, as they seem to already do, will a social media network, like Facebook, be mandatory for all people (at least over a certain age)? In this web 2.0 world, having a social media network to help keep track of the citizens could be wildly beneficial, in the eyes of the government. When disaster strikes, whether human or natural, they would have pretty accurate figures early on about the damages it took. At least in America (since I am unaware of other countries’ policies on this) when it comes to the census, collecting data would be even easier, as most of it already exists on people’s Facebook profiles. Once again, I completely understand the idea of privacy is deeply invaded with this; however, I honestly, don’t think we have that much privacy to begin with already online and though people may not be fully aware of that, they are for the most part content with it. Also when you have a government taking part and being connected with a social media site, the idea that they are censoring content also comes into play, though this idea of being connected with Facebook for data is more of a one way street – the government does not affect Facebook, rather Facebook just makes information of their users available to them. 

Overall, I am not fully advocating for this to happen and do not think it will happen any time soon; however, with this new digital age where media is converging, the government using Facebook as a tool to crowd source information may not be a horrible thing, especially when disaster strikes.