As policy makers, emergency responders and communities reflect on the 2019/2020 bushfire season and how we can be better prepared and adapt for the future, we have developed this report to share insights about how Facebook’s apps and products were used to contribute more information to this conversation.
Local Alerts are designed to help authorities communicate urgent, need-to-know information to their communities in instances where action is taken to protect lives - for events such as bushfires, flooding or emergency situations. We’re expanding Local Alerts to eligible state fire and emergency services in Australia.
As global and national health authorities work to respond to the coronavirus pandemic, at Facebook we worked to connect people with authoritative information from regional and local health organisations in Australia and limit the spread of misinformation and harmful content about the virus. We also shared aggregated and anonymised mobility data and high resolution population density maps with researchers to assist them in developing their understanding about the spread of the disease.
To make it easier to reach a global community and raise money on Facebook, we’ve built free tools to help Australian non-profits collect donations and enable supporters to fundraise on their behalf. Non-profits using Facebook’s payment platform to process donations pay no fee — 100% of the donations go to the charity. In 2020, over $75M was raised for Australian non-profits through Facebook.