Monday, November 16, 2015

Social media during Paris attacks

Social media is not reliable on breaking news stories but it is extremely useful and can add a lot of value. Specially, the Facebook Safety Check. Which was created for natural disasters. But, this November it was used during the Paris attacks. Facebook Safety Check had an important role. It sent the question of “are you ok?” to users in the Paris metropolitan area, and they only had to press a button. Even though it was not used during other previous attacks, Facebook already announced that they will have the feature even in cities were Facebook is not highly used. Let’s pray for not having to use it again.

During the Paris attacks, “Within the first 24 hours of the crisis, 4.1 million people made use of the feature reaching over 360 million of their friends and family.”

Also, some hashtags were useful. Parisians used #porteouverte to let tourists and people around the area know that their homes were open for shelter during the attacks. There were open messages with addresses and also people offered their homes if anyone messaged directly.

“The hashtag was re-posed 480,000 times making it the second-most used keyword on Twitter”

As usual, there was also misinformation that people published to gain followers and retweets. In the future, as a social media user filter information and research for the useful sources that you have available through the different platforms.

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