Severe weather, traffic incidents and crime disrupt routines and threaten lives. Facebook announced Tuesday that is arming state, city and local government emergency managers with the ability to issue local alerts that will rise to the top of news feeds during dangerous situations.
Potential uses include storm warnings and advisories for extreme temperatures, evacuations, road closures, active shooter situations, bomb threats, missing person reports, water main breaks and more. The aim is to keep its users “safe and in-the-know.”
Anthea Watson Strong, a product manager at Facebook, said such local information is users’ “number one most unmet need” on their social media platform and that she is “excited to give a tool to emergency management partners to serve (constituents) more effectively.”
Facebook has tested these local alerts with 350 partners, but will launch this service nationally over the next few months. Jimmy O’Keefe, product marketing manager, said agencies have most frequently alerted about hazardous weather and that they showed off their value during Hurricane Barry which struck Louisiana in July as well as Hurricane Florence and the California wildfires in 2018.
In a blog post for Facebook, Watson Strong wrote that the during Barry, Louisiana’s Tangipahoa Parish Government used these alerts to disseminate real-time updates on wind, rain and river levels while also providing information on sandbag distribution.
She said users have been very receptive to this kind of information.
“(W)e surveyed about 2,000 people who had seen posts marked as local alerts, and found that 73 percent reported the posts provided new information they hadn’t yet seen elsewhere,” Watson Strong wrote. “43 percent reported that they took an action as a result of the information they saw. And 80 percent reported that posts were at least somewhat valuable.”
Emergency management agencies from state, city and county governments will be able craft these alerts. Posts marked as alerts will reach many more users compared to those without an alert tag. Agencies can specify the type of alert (weather, traffic, etc.), set the duration, and indicate what areas will most likely be affected to target who receives it.
During the testing phase, which began in 2018, Facebook opened up this feature to agencies it has relationships with but will offer access to all agencies involved in emergency preparedness and response and use a third party to validate their legitimacy.
Interested agencies can sign up using an online form.
To guard against “alert fatigue,” Facebook will limit how many times a page can use an alert to once a day, with an extra five during an ongoing crisis. It said that during testing, users did not report misuse or overuse of alerts.
To receive local alerts, users just need to follow the Facebook page of the emergency management or first responder agencies in their communities.
This alert initiative follows Facebook’s announcement that it will soon introduce a NewsTab on its platform, a listing of recent and relevant stories for readers, curated by journalists.
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