The Queensland Police Service has been credited as an early influencer of Facebook's safety check and disaster map features that now help communities connect in times of crisis.
Users have increasingly turned to the social media giant during unfolding incidents, including terror attacks, to mark themselves as safe for family and friends.
The company this week shed light on the evolving mechanics of the feature and its origins.
While Facebook staff used to manually switch on the safety check it's community-activated now.
Mia Garlick, who's a director of policy working on the company's safety tools in Australia, says Facebook's tech wizards paid particular attention to the Queensland police's use of social media when the state was inundated by floodwaters in 2011.
"We saw one of the first instances of communities really using social media very effectively to both share information about the crisis but help each other after the crisis," Ms Garlick said in Sydney.
The same year, Facebook teams in Japan noticed a similar pattern after a devastating earthquake and tsunami and built the first version of the safety check feature.
It has since been activated 39 times.
The company receives information from international crisis agencies about unfolding incidents and then examines Facebook activity in the region.
If there's a spike in posts using relevant words - for example, earthquake or fire - the safety check kicks in automatically.
The company also travelled to areas of the world affected by high-profile disasters seeking user feedback.
"Speaking to the inherent goodness within communities, people said they wanted to ask for, or offer, help," Ms Garlick said.
An expansion was rolled out last week that lets users offer help - whether that be accommodation, food and water or supplies - in all types of crises rather than just natural disasters.
Cautious of how vulnerable communities can be after disasters, the company said it also included protections such as the ability to report inappropriate posts, limiting the feature to over-18s, and only sharing approximate locations.
The radius of the impacted area and number of people prompted to mark themselves safe is relative to the population in that area.
While the safety check is most prominent in large-scale incidents such as terror attacks in the UK and France, it was also active when a bushfire in Perth's semi-rural southeast flared in February.
"There are more (activations) and they're a lot smaller because people in those impacted areas are self-triggering," Ms Garlick said.
