Facebook under fire for 'double standard'

 Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder and CEO    (C)Facebook

Facebook's decision to implement its "safety check" feature for the attacks in Paris, but not after bomb blasts in Beirut a day earlier, has prompted debate online. Critics of the site accused it of valuing the lives of Western victims more than those in the Middle East and other regions, a charge disputed by others, who said there are other factors at play. The company introduced the feature shortly after the coordinated attacks across Paris late on Friday, which left at least 129 people dead.
The function allowed users in the Paris region to "check-in" and let family members and friends know that they were safe. The company had previously only implemented the use of the feature after natural disasters, such as the recent earthquake in Pakistan. Social media users took issue with the decision and expressed anger that it had been used after the attacks in France, but not in Beirut where suicide bombers had killed at least 43 people a day earlier. Both attacks were claimed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group.
Lebanese blogger Joey Ayoub criticised the apparent disparity in reactions to the two sets of attacks, arguing that the deaths in Beirut did not seem to matter as much as the deaths in Paris.
"We don't get a safe button on Facebook. 'We' don't get late night statements from the most powerful men and women alive and millions of online users.
"It's a hard thing to realise that for all that was said ... most of us members of this curious species, are still excluded from the dominant concerns of the world," Ayoub wrote.
Ayoub was not alone in his criticism, with many users on Twitter asking why Facebook had not used the feature in Lebanon.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder and CEO, has addressed the criticism, telling users they were right to ask why "safety check" was used in one instance but not the other.
"Until yesterday, our policy was only to activate safety check for natural disasters. We just changed this and now plan to activate safety check for more human disasters going forward as well," he wrote on a post on the Facebook website.
"We care about all people equally, and we will work hard to help people suffering in as many of these situations as we can."
Facebook also introduced a feature allowing users to place an overlay of the French flag on their display pictures to express solidarity with the attack, a move that has also attracted criticism online.
Al Jazeera contacted Facebook to ask why the option to add flags to profile pictures had not been offered for previous attacks in other countries, but had not received a response at the time of publication.

Source:  Aljazeera