[Dharmakirti]

I'm really sorry for being a Debbie downer here but I find the lack of such initiatives for Turkish (or similar) blasts in past week appalling. Were the lives of the non-European victims not worth FaceBook/HNs attention?

Is this selective outrage really suits a rational platform like HackerNews?

[arjie]

Eh? It looks like they turned it on for the Ankara blasts[0].

Anyway, the whole thing reminds me of the NPR bit about "The Cost of Free"[1]. People's expectations rapidly change once you offer some of them something. While the main lesson in that story is about charging after offering something for free for many years, there's the second lesson: the reason it was made free was that the Brits were upset that the Americans got free doughnuts.

Afterwards, no one got free doughnuts. It's funny. Something that seems clearly like a Pareto improvement ends up not being one because of people's opinions of perceived privilege.

0: https://www.facebook.com/sheryl/posts/10156585333855177

1: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/13/156737801/the-c...

[IkmoIkmo]

There's a very popular experiment that goes a bit like this. You and another person must share $100. You get to pick the distribution, the other gets to accept or reject. You get one choice.

If you pick say $50 each, the other person tends to always accept. If you give him more, he'll accept too. But what if you give yourself $75, and the other $25?

If he rejects it, you both get nothing. Turns out, at certain levels (cant remember where), people tend to reject.

Which is interesting, because every non-0 figure is a benefit to you. If you get $5 and the other $95, why reject it? You'd get nothing. It's a one-time experiment, you're basically rejecting free money.

It turns out that the other guy getting $95 and 'screwing you', is so bad, that you'd rather reject free money than for him to get more than he 'deserves'.

Now if this was your enemy, or say someone close to you, sure. But this experiment holds with complete strangers you don't see and will never meet. The notion that someone gets more than you, when normal moral notions suppose you deserve an equal amount, incites people to be vengeful even at the cost of free money.

[RobertoG]

I think that there is a good explanation for that emotional reaction.

We have not evolved in an environment where you interact with "complete strangers you don't see and will never meet". So, you can't allow others take the upper hand on you too much. That is even more true if third parties are observing the interaction.

You can see the same, for instance, in how pub fights start for the most stupid reasons. Even if is a big city and they will never meet again, they can't just leave it alone because when our brain was programmed it was not going to be only an interaction. And if your friends, or god forbid, attractive women are present, then the contenders are trapped in the situation.

[jsprogrammer]

There is no such thing as free money.

[gokhan]

Facebook did the same for the last Ankara bombing (and for the other two in the last 5 months, if you're interested). When you have bombs blast in your capital each month it's quite hard to expect same amount of interest from these people, even us living in Turkey are getting (sadly) used to it.

[Kiro]

I find the lack of research appalling. You are just presuming this wasn't activated for the Turkish blasts which it was.

[tobltobs]

Maybe the lack lack of such initiatives for Turkish was caused by Facebook being banned in the Turkey.

[yuvadam]

Sounds like a pretty lame excuse for a board filled with so-called 'Hackers'.

[tobltobs]

Can you explain?

[jrowley]

I agree. It'd be terrible UX if I was Turkish, Facebook had the check in feature, some of my friends could get around the block and say they are okay while others couldn't.

[aub3bhat]

FB has enabled safety check several other times, such as floods, earthquakes etc. in India & Nepal. There is nothing about selective outrage.

[jMyles]

On some level, it betrays a judgement from facebook about what constitutes "terrorism." I don't think there has ever been a safety check after a hellfire missile from a US drone.

[staticelf]

Don't know, I read a lot about the Turkish bombings. Also a lot of complaints that people don't take it as seriously like you do. But I would say people take it seriously and the people complaining just makes everything worse.

But for me that lives in EU, a bomb in EU feels much closer than a bomb in Turkey. It is not strange at all?

[jMyles]

> Don't know, I read a lot about the Turkish bombings

What point are you making here? If they were covered a lot, why no safety check?

[cr1895]

You mean like this:

https://www.facebook.com/safetycheck/ankaraturkey-explosion-...

[jMyles]

I was referring to the March 19 event. Maybe there is one and I missed it? Or maybe it was too small?

[cr1895]

That I don't know. In any case it is wrong for people to assume this is only applied for cities like Brussels and Paris.

[mjolk]

It's not a contest.

[tnuc]

COUGH http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/when-paris-was-attacke...

[dave2000]

Possibly Europeans are more interested in European news, just like Arab/Asian countries are more interested in their culture's news. I admit when their culture/ethics/religion encroaches upon Europe's, such as with this week's outrage, things get mixed up little. I'm sure the Turkish equivalent of Facebook has its own system.

[cheetos]

You're really sure of nothing. Turkey is neither Arab nor does it have its own Facebook equivalent.

[dave2000]

Arab/Asian is what I said. And I'm obviously aware there's no Arab/Asian Facebook. That's my point. "Why is your site suited to your needs?"

[miguelrochefort]

Truth is that most first-world citizens, including myself, can only relate to other first-world citizens. If a tragic event hits Nigeria, Pakistan or even Turkey, I will probably ignore it.

Hypocrisy? Yes.

Surprising? Not really.

[arien]

We're most likely to care about what is/feels closer to us, what we can relate to, what we know. You'd feel more if your neighbour whom you greet every day on the foyer died in a car crash that if it were a random person you didn't know at all, right? It's the same principle.

I also think that there is not just empathy at play, but fear. Because the closer an event is to us or the people we know/relate to, the more we realise it could also happen to us.

[oneeyedpigeon]

Sad that you get downvoted for telling the truth, even if it's an uncomfortable truth. Upvoted to compensate.

[icebraining]

Maybe it just needs to be said with some humour

https://youtu.be/QKboodmEHTQ?t=4m24s

[21]

And it's not only Facebook.

These Brussels attacks have wall-to-wall coverage on all news stations, including local ones, unlike the Turkish blasts which were covered much less and only by the major outlets.

[tobltobs]

Maybe it is because such blasts are more common in country which wages a civil war against a part of his inhabitants.

[guard-of-terra]

Belgium can be looked at this way too.

Belgium wages war against ISIS as a part of NATO, and ISIS includes some Belgian citizens, so they wage war against them. It's just they are further away than Kurds. But as we can see, explosion-wise, this makes small difference.

[m00dy]

beyin.dll not found

[miguelrochefort]

> And it's not only Facebook.

It goes without saying. My statement was meant to be general.

[return0]

Surprising how first-world people don't even know who s in the first world (this includes the majority of your responders, sadly).

[jbmorgado]

So what? FB also exists in non 1st world countries in case you didn't noticed.

You may ignore it since you don't know anyone there, but people from there would appreciate knowing their friends and relatives are safe.

Still, like it was already told, FB did activate the feature also in the Ankara bombings and other occasions for Turkey, there is nothing racist here going on.

[jcromartie]

People in third world nations don't have any empathy super powers for people who are ethnically, religiously, or socio-economically from themselves either.

[Numberwang]

Why are we not showing proportionally even more outrage of drunk driving deaths?

[varjag]

But drunk driving deaths are insignificant compared to prostate cancer, let's show outrage to prostate cancer instead?

[oneeyedpigeon]

a) intent b) number of casualties

[cmdrfred]

Intent is valid point, number of casualties is not. Terrorism is nearly statistically insignificant in the scheme of things. If you are truly concerned about human life buying mosquito nets will offer you much greater ROI compared to any anti-terrorism measures you can envision.

[oneeyedpigeon]

You're right, I should have been way more specific. I mean number of casualties in the one specific incident. Terrorist acts often involve tens, if not hundreds, of people, both killed and injured. In the vast majority of cases, a drink-driving accident will affect a handful of people.

Nothing about any of this is very rational, but there's something in our collective nature that draws more attention to a single incident involving X casualties than X/Y unrelated incidents each involving Y casualties.

[IkmoIkmo]

> Terrorist acts often involve tens, if not hundreds, of people, both killed and injured.

Actually terror attacks that harm more than 10 or 100 people, as opposed to less than 10, are a small minority. [0]

[0] http://www.state.gov/j/ct/rls/crt/2013/224831.htm

[dsq]

The fallacy in the "terror kills statistically insignificant numbers of people compared to driving" type of argument is that the intent of the perpetrators is to cause as much damage as possible, unlike the average text reading driver, and they are prevented from doing so by the police and spy agencies. Left to act freely, the perps would kill thousands or millions gladly.

[cmdrfred]

>Left to act freely, the perps would kill thousands or millions gladly.

Firstly, these are mostly teenagers in caves with yesterdays cell phones. They simply don't have the resources or the numbers to kill millions, or even tens of thousands. I don't think you understand that your argument is a purely emotional one[1]. It appears to be rather simple to sneak a firearm on a plane[2], and yet there has not been any repeat attacks like 9/11. Firearms are illegal in Paris and they have large divisions of domestic and foreign spies, that failed to prevent anything[3]. Now lawmakers around the globe want to outlaw prime numbers (encryption) yet terrorists don't seem to even bother using it[4]. Emotion aside, dollar for dollar, fighting malaria is more effective in preventing the loss of human life than fighting terrorism by many orders of magnitude.

[1]"If a man is crossing a river And an empty boat collides with his own skiff, Even though he be a bad-tempered man He will not become very angry. But if he sees a man in the boat, He will shout to him to steer clear. And if the shout is not heard he will shout Again, and yet again, and begin cursing - And all because there is somebody in that boat. Yet if the boat were empty, He would not be shouting, and he would not be angry." - Chuang Tzu

[2]http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/01/tsa-fails-95-percen... [3]http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/18/europe/paris-terror-attacks-in... [4]https://bgr.com/2016/03/22/paris-attacks-iphone-encryption/

[aorth]

Something about this bothers me too. I am trying to formulate a way to look at this that gives Facebook the benefit of the doubt, like "anyone you can help is good, even if you can't help them all"... but there's a pessimism in me that says Facebook is being opportunist.

[mjolk]

For a site this ubiquitous, they don't need to scrape the bottom of the barrel to get a few more page views -- I think this is earnestly meant as a service to others.

I don't have a Facebook account, so I can't verify, but at least on that landing page, they're not serving up advertisements.

[TallGuyShort]

Can't speak for Facebook, but as for HNs attention, you didn't submit a story about those blasts. How appalling. If you think something is important and relevant to HN's interests, submit it. It's not 100% everyone else's responsibility to submit things to get votes.

[tnuc]

Rational platform? Selective outrage?

Glenn Greenwald (The guy who broke the Snowden story) sums it up quite nicely. https://theintercept.com/2016/03/08/nobody-knows-the-identit...