To think Facebook 'marking yourself safe' option is overused?

[iismum]

Sure, it's fantastic if, for example, you were at the Ariane Grande concert or it you spend a lot of time in the vicinity of London Bridge and there was a real chance you might have got caught up in the terror attacks and people would genuinely worry. But I feel like people obsessively marking themselves safe just because they live within 20 miles of the event when there was practically no chance they were involved just feeds the general hysteria and makes people feel that no one is safe.

To be honest, I was not beside myself worrying if my friend in leafy south-west London who probably crosses London Bridge twice a year was safe. What happened is horrendous, but 6 people died. Practically everyone in London is safe. I feel like people's need to mark themselves safe is increasing the impact of these attacks when we should be trying to do the opposite.

A lot of people have very mundane jobs and its a bit of drama for them and they get all excited and have to get a bit emotional
Oh do duck off.
Its not a bit of drama to spice up my mundane SAHM life, its a bloody tragedy. Yay to you if no one you know was killed in the last 3 months by a terrorist but there are hundreds of people who have lost loved ones or whose loved ones lives have been irrevocably changed. Two of my friends who marked themselves safe could very reasonably have been in the middle of it, one nearly was. It would devastate me if anything happened to them, not give me something to be a bit excited and emotional over

All these 'I was so glad to see my friend/relative was safe'

If you were worried,why not contact them directly? If it's someone you vaguely know or met at a festival once in 2006 and haven't kept in touch since but you know they live in London, I can't really imagine you're going out of your kind with worry until you see the Facebook check.

Yes, there are some outlandish help offers on there also- I've seen 'phone me and I can help you come to terms with anything tragic you've witnessed' and an offer of blood 'directly to the victims' from 90miles away

YANBU but I have friends in London where I used to live being asked if they were ok by Americans (for example). I was embarrassed for the position they're in now, asked if they're ok, when they were tucked up in bed in Crouch End.

Whilst I agree there are some people that milk situations like these...I do think you have under estimated how much people do worry. Yes, London is a big place but you never know what your friends who live there are up to at the time and where they may be.
My best friend lives in Paris and when I woke up to the news of the attacks there, I was so stressed as I didn't know where she'd have been that Friday night and there was every chance she could have been in one of the places. I couldn't get hold of her straight away so was relieved when I opened Facebook and she'd marked herself as safe. She was still waiting on news of a friend who was at the Bataclan and sadly hadn't made it.

YABU. Borough Market and the area around London Bridge are hardly obscure, out of the way places that Londoners are unlikely to visit. I was relieved to see friends of mine who live in London check in to say they're safe.

I don't really see the disadvantage.

Swansea friend has no idea why she is marked as safe, she must have clicked it by accident

Harriet, I didn't want to text at 11pm, when I'm sure their family were trying to contact them. I waited until this morning. One of them I was going to message and had started writing it out at 8am when he marked himself safe. You don't want to hound every person who lives in the area, when the likelihood of it being them is very small. If it were a blood relative, different, but a friend, it's ok to wait 12 hours and see if they mark themselves safe in that time, knowing they have closer friends/family than you.

YANBU
Whilst having it as an option is very good as it's a great way to let people know you're safe without having to text or phone individual people, but the amount of people I see using it are ridiculous.

With the Ariana concert in Manchester for example; I had a couple of friends who attended the concert so seeing them check in came as a huge relief, but then I had others that I knew would not be at an Ariana Grande concert in a million years, and would have no reason to be in the vicinity of the arena (or the city centre for that matter) at that time on a Monday night, yet they still felt the need to check in.
I felt like replying to their check in with an 'I know you're safe as you checked in at your house in Altrincham, along with a selfie of you in PJs with a glass of wine just half hour before the attack' or 'I know you're safe because I've seen from your multiple updates that you've been on holiday in Cyprus since Thursday'

I didn't reply of course, I just ignored their check ins

DingDong - a stealth boast on a thread like this!? Really? No, of course it isn't, it was an illustration of the button not being overused. And no, they're not all friends. I've got 900ish 'people' on FB because I've been a member for 10+ years and have never bothered to delete anyone. I think a lot of people are similar in their laziness! I called them 'friends' because it's a facebook friends list. I don't even know a lot of them any more and have an average number of actual friends.

MommaGee, well said. It matters to everybody. And, at some point some haughty cynical poster always wades in and decide that they alone have the right respectful reaction to the incident and that others' reactions are mere grief tourism, and they will keep on posting on the thread to berate others for looking for drama by posting on a thread!

If it's someone you vaguely know or met at a festival once in 2006 and haven't kept in touch since but you know they live in London, I can't really imagine you're going out of your kind with worry until you see the Facebook check

Because Facebook friends generally also include mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, best friends, colleagues etc

I'm not worried about Bob I met at a pub once, but I am genuinely worried about my colleague whose on a date in the area, my friend who is a nurse at a local hospital, and our friends who live in a flat right above where this happened. All of them marked themselves as safe before I needed to get in touch.

Yes, there are ridiculous people, but this thread demonstrates that there's utility in the function.

YANBU

Or at least, people who'd not be anywhere near the place but might have friends/relatives panicking because they've no idea of the geography of a city could use the Does Not Apply to reassure people even more, surely? That lets people no you were never at any kind of risk at all.

Whether or not it is the intention, marking yourself "safe" when you were never going to be at any kind of risk can give the impression you're trying to claim some kind of part in what happened, beyond the anger & sadness we all feel. For people who are born-and-bred Londoners there can be very strong emotional ties to their bits of London as well - so this feels very personal & very raw; & to some of them, someone from Putney who's been to Borough Market once 10 years ago marking themselves safe will feel like a massive pisstake (though obviously the person from Putney who drinks there every weekend = fine & the tourists from all over ditto...)

YABU.

I have friends who live in London and often visit Borough market area, I was glad to see them mark themselves safe.
Easy for you to sit there and criticise. What does it matter to you anyway?

YABU. Not everybody has a full understanding of London's geography. I don't live in London any more but when I did if anything ever happened my parents would worry because a) they didn't necessarily understand how far away I was from a certain area and b) I did spend a lot of time in the centre (as most Londoners do) so they weren't to know if I had been in the vicinity of an incident or not.

I find it baffling how people can genuinely find it annoying to have to scroll past an update that will have set someone's mind at rest. Less than a second of your life - it's not exactly a hardship, is it?

Dh used to work in Sidcup. We know a lot of people who either work or go to college in Sidcup. Dd did a summer school there last year. London Bridge is the station you have to go via to get from Sidcup to central London. Last year when we were staying there & decided to do an impromptu west end show visit we had to go through London Bridge.

So I'm glad people away from the area marked themselves as safe.

I think it's a good idea used appropriately. It irritates me when I see friends use marked 'safe' in a different county! This is because I feel it is actually attention seeking and detracting from the real trauma of people genuinely involved.

TBF, these people irritate me generally with attention seeking posts, so it's another RU OK hun?? Type thing.

Also as others say the use of 'safe' does imply being involved. I think a 'I'm fine' button would be better?

Most people use it fine, it's a tool to reassure friends and family.

YABU. For some of us it is a useful tool. My brother works and socialises right there. I think ringing him at the time would be pretty unlikely to get an answer if he was caught up in it. Seeing 'safe' allowed me and our elderly mother to relax.

There's bit of an epidemic of competitive "respectfulness" on MN at the moment.

I don't live anywhere near the attacks, but do live in London.

Yesterday, I went to London Bridge for what is probably the second or third time in two years. People close to me would know I was there that day, but wouldn't know I was safely home. People who I don't see regularly might have seen the picture I posted of The Shard earlier that day and jumped to conclusions. I have many friends who have never visited London, and might not have a grasp on who is likely to be affected and who isn't of their London friends.

I agree marking yourself safe from Yorkshire is a bit much, but I had loads of people worried about me yesterday from abroad. YABU.

That I can't understand, people who know her on FB must have seen the other posts so they know she is safe and sound at home.
Some people are really thick, though, and 'at home watching BGT' doesn't equal 'not at London Bridge'.

It's worse that one of my FB friends went to a show last night in London and has multiple messages on her FB page asking if she's ok and she's not replied, just changed her profile pic to the 'we stand with London' one.

I was in London last night and in fact passed a few feet from everything as it was happening, but because I didn't see it I assumed it was just an accident. By the time I got home it was on the news so I put a couple of posts on Facebook saying oh yes we were really close etc. But I could see people who live 20 miles from the centre of London posting they were safe and I felt like replying and saying "oh so were you in London just now then?"

Unless you were in London (and by that I mean central London not 10 miles away in the suburbs) then I don't see why people are saying they are safe, and I agree its an RU OK Hun type of thing.

Only one of my friends has marked herself safe. She was at the Depeche Mode concert last night and was staying overnight in a hotel. She's had lots of people message her to ask if she's OK from friends who just know she's somewhere in London. That seems a perfectly reasonable use of FB to avoid lots of messages.

I think the issue with marking oneself safe is that it's been so over-used e.g. People marking themselves as safe from Liverpool during the Westminster attack or marking themselves safe after the Croydon tram crash that people have lost perspective i.e. Those doing the safe-marking either don't know if it's appropriate to do so or click a button purely because they can and attention-seek while doing so, and those reading are becoming increasingly irritated by John from Manchester marking himself safe during the London Bridge attack.

It's also worth bearing in mind that during a terror attack it's not just a case of letting people know you're still alive and well, but also that they gain an idea that you're not caught up in the attacks in some way.

The London Bridge attack will have had a huge knock-on effect on everyone in the area, not because of potential fatalities or injuries but also in terms of ability to get home etc. I live in Orpington but London Bridge is one of my main stations into London and I go there regularly including to Borough market. Had I been in London last night (I wasn't) then I would literally have been stuck in London overnight as there were no trains passing anywhere near or through London Bridge and as such I would have been stuck and unable to get home until who-knows when, and the same would be the case for thousands of other people.

Places like Westminster and Manchester arena are very specific locations, however London Bridge really isn't. Anyone could be passing through the area at any time, it's far more of a central location than previous attack incidents, but previous incidents have distorted the idea of what's right and wrong.