Sophia Tulp

USA TODAY

Facebook activated its Safety Check feature Monday morning after an attacker on the Ohio State University campus left at least seven injured.

This year alone Facebook has activated Safety Check dozens of times, according to the company. And since June 2016, when Facebook expanded the ability for communities to activate a Safety Check, they say it has been triggered “hundreds of times.”

This appears to be the first time Facebook has activated a safety check in response to an attack on a U.S. college campus. USA TODAY College has reached out to Facebook to confirm whether that is the case.

The safety check, entitled “The Violent Incident in Columbus, Ohio,” allows those in the area to mark themselves "safe," "unsafe" or "outside the affected area" with the click of a button. Users can also invite friends to mark their safety status.

Around 10 a.m. Nov. 28, the OSU emergency message system released an alert notifying students of an active shooter situation and urging them to shelter in place. That order stayed active until about 11:30 a.m. when university police lifted it, saying that the “scene was secure.” Classes were canceled on the Columbus campus for the rest of the day.

Local media outlets, including the USA TODAY Network newspaper the Cincinnati Enquirer, reported that a suspect had died. Other reports said the suspect had wielded a machete and a gun.

The Safety Check feature was introduced in October 2014, and its first major deployment came in April 2015 after the 7.8 magnitude earthquake in Nepal. The feature was used again just over a year ago during the November 2015 Paris, France terrorist attacks — the first one in response to a non-natural disaster — and in March 2016, during reports of a terrorist bombing at an airport and train station in Brussels, Belgium.

The check-in was deployed for the first time in the United States in June 2016 during the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, and again in October 2016 for Hurricane Matthew. A community-activated alert went out after violent protests in Charlotte, North Carolina, in September 2016.

In an Oct. 27 update from Facebook, the company announced it was testing a way for communities to deploy the Safety Check more widely.

“When an incident occurs and enough people in the area start talking about it on Facebook, they receive a message asking them if they are okay. They can then mark themselves safe and invite friends to use Safety Check as well. If lots of people start marking themselves safe, Facebook may turn on Safety Check more widely,” the announcement stated.

Dillon Mitchell, a senior studying film at Ohio State University, marked himself safe through the feature, after many family members reached out to him about the reports of an attack on his campus. He says he received a Facebook notification that one of his friends had checked in, and Facebook prompted him to check in as well. He says it "seemed like a no brainer to bring loved ones a small sense of relief."

“I was in my apartment because I had yet to leave for classes thankfully,” Mitchell told USA TODAY College via Facebook. “Family members kept calling me, and friends on other campuses were checking in, so I thought the Facebook system would be the easiest way to reach everyone who might be worried about me. Likewise, I wanted to let my friends across campus know I was safe as well as feed into the precedent of letting people know you're safe as soon as possible.”



Sophia Tulp is an Ithaca College student and a USA TODAY College digital producer.

This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.