Facebook’s Safety Check has been deployed during and in the aftermath of terrorist attacks and natural disasters, letting people mark themselves as safe and check whether loved ones are okay. Now, the social network has introduced a permanent tab in the app menu leading to a Safety Check page – or hub of morbid curiosity, if you will.
“There's now a single place to go to see where Safety Check has recently been activated, get the information you need and potentially be able to help affected areas,” the Facebook team wrote in an update. The launch means the tool is no longer a locally-relevant fixture, but more a news hub of global conflicts and emergencies, a potentially overwhelming news feed for crises.
The reasoning behind the launch is unclear – though Facebook tells us it simply wants to build a safe and supportive community. Popularity and demand for the feature may have increased, leading to the change. Or it may be that our world is rapidly becoming a worse place, requiring a social network page to collate all that misery. Or it might simply be a response to those users that find the feature confusing and alarming when it crops up in their feed. Whatever the reasoning, it’s easy to see the page becoming a draw for those with a morbid fascination for disaster and crises: it will become the internet equivalent of a permanent car crash on the side of every byway and highway you turn on to. Or, worse still, it could become a focus for people who struggle with mental health issues.
Read more: How Facebook wants to save the world
Individuals that suffer from social anxiety are known to deploy ‘safety behaviours’ as a means to distract and protect themselves. The habit has been studied for decades by experimental psychologists, and the resounding conclusion is that these behaviours exasperate, rather than counter, feelings of anxiety. Every time a safety behaviour is used – in a social situation this might be something as simple as avoiding eye contact – it reinforces the idea that the situation is threatening, and anxiety levels remain elevated, if not heightened, in anticipation of disaster.
In Psychology Today, chair of Mercer University’s department of clinical medical psychology, Craig Marker, explains that he advises patients to in fact “do the opposite of what their anxiety tells them”.
“Their anxiety is telling them to play it safe, but to get past it, they must push themselves... We have them wear bright and outrageous clothing to call attention to themselves. When they do these 'opposite' behaviours, they are basically telling their body that there is nothing to fear and that they have the ability to cope on their own no matter what the circumstance.”
These studies are of course linked specifically with social behaviours and social anxiety, not in-app fear-mongering. But without the data to understand how Safety Check impacts Facebook’s two billion users, existing peer-based studies give us an inkling of the tool’s influence. In the US alone, 18 per cent of the population suffer from anxiety. That figure varies from nation to nation, and year to year, but extrapolated to Facebook’s community would amount to 360,000,000 people – not including those with panic disorders, phobias, post-traumatic stress disorder and other related mental health issues.
A 2008 study published in the Journal of Behaviour Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry showed “the value of dropping safety behaviours and reducing self-focus” as a means of therapy for those with social phobias.
“Although safety behaviours are usually perceived to be helpful by those using them, research suggests that these strategies have the paradoxical effect of exacerbating the problem – rehearsing your speech is likely to lead to the conversation not flowing, gripping a glass for fear of shaking is likely to actually produce the dreaded shaking,” explains paper coauthor, Catarina Sacadura, an NHS clinical psychologist. “These strategies prevent people from realising that they would probably be okay to start off with and others might not be as judgemental as predicted. The use of safety behaviours also exacerbates the internal focus of attention – attention is placed on how we feel and our anxious thoughts during a social situation rather than the social interaction, which is likely to maintain a sense of threat and increase anxiety.” The title of the paper, tellingly, was: Why social anxiety persists: An experimental investigation of the role of safety behaviours as a maintaining factor.
It is not an alien concept to associate social media use with social anxiety. The medium provides an intense platform for some of our negative social behaviours to be played out to the extreme. A survey carried out by the Royal Society for Public Health and the Young Health Movement found that among 1,500 14-to-24-year-olds, Instagram had the most negative impact on mental health. Although Snapchat, Twitter and Facebook were all deemed harmful by the study, the image-and-video-sharing platform was found to enhance feelings of anxiety and inadequacy.
One writer for the Atlantic, Laura Turner, wrote an article in July describing how Twitter exacerbated her own mental health issues: “As a lifelong sufferer of anxiety, using Twitter is also making my anxiety worse. The like-minded community I’ve built on Twitter has made confessing anxiety easier than ever, but the comparison Twitter enables has made the experience of anxiety worse.”
Turner describes the two main strands of medically recognised anxiety: trait, which is a habitual and persistent tendency to worry; and state, a temporary response to a threatening situation. Facebook’s own permanent Safety Check tab, could be argued to feed both. Anyone that has absent-mindedly opened the Facebook app and scrolled for several minutes through their news feed, before asking themselves why they are once again staring at baby photos and holiday snaps belonging to a friend of a friend, can relate to how painfully habitual social media has become. Safety Check could provide a tool for reinforcing fears, just as safety behaviours do in social situations.
Death anxiety – the fear of one’s own death as well as loved ones’ – is a common form of anxiety, but can present in overwhelming ways in severe cases, causing individuals to become housebound, suffer panic attacks, repeatedly imagine different ways of dying and generally become preoccupied with thoughts and fears of death in a way that interferes with daily life. A safety behaviour of an anxious individual might be to gather all the information they can about potentially dangerous situations. Put a smartphone app in the hands of that individual, one that provides a constant stream of information on loved ones and now a tab that will allow them to know whether said loved ones are safe or not, and that starts to feel like a genuine risk, and an unnecessary one at that.
“It is not farfetched to think that this could have implications in terms of people's anxiety about danger, particularly terrorist attacks, natural disasters et cetera,” says Sacadura. “One of the factors that seems to fuel anxiety, in general, is focusing on a threat in a way that may aggravate the perception of that threat. Whilst the risk of being a victim of terrorism or of a natural disaster is relatively low, being constantly exposed to reminders of this potential danger may have implications in terms of how likely we think this is to happen – in other words, how much of a danger this actually represents to us. Having said this, I have no reasons to believe this would necessarily be different to being exposed to a stream of bad news on media. Only research can actually tell.”
For all the anxieties social media can exacerbate – body issues, harassment, social anxieties – bodily fear for your safety and that of your loved ones was perhaps the one that had escaped its domain. Now, for some, opening the Facebook app may provide an increased heart rate and sweaty palms, as the evolutionary fight or flight fear response kicks in and they seek out the daily, hourly, minute-to-minute chance that a crisis somewhere, somehow, is impacting their own sense of safety.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
