Local governments will soon be able to use Facebook to send emergency alerts

mood · Aug 28, 2019

Local governments will soon be able to use Facebook to send emergency alerts
Facebook will ‘greatly amplify’ these alerts
August 27, 2019
https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/27/...sponders-facebook-safety-check-community-help

Facebook has long positioned itself as a place where communities can share information during a crisis. Today, the company said it will start giving local governments and first responders the ability to send alerts to their communities during an emergency.

When a Facebook page operated by a government or first responder marks a post as a local alert, Facebook says it will “greatly amplify” the post to followers of that page in their News Feeds and send the alerts as notifications to them.

A key assumption about the usefulness of a local alert is that Facebook doesn’t go down when there’s an emergency, but the social network has already had notable outages in March, April, July, and August of this year. If Facebook wants to position itself as a communications tool that users can rely on during emergencies, it will need to do more to ensure that it doesn’t go down when people need it most.
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Local governments will soon be able to use Facebook to send emergency alerts

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Local governments will soon be able to use Facebook to send emergency alerts

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