Crisis Response-ability : What The Myanmar Earthquake Teaches Us About The Inadequacy Of Facebook’s Crisis Response Center

On 28 March 2025, Myanmar, which has been embroiled in a civil war since the country faced a military coup in 2021, was hit by yet another crisis: the worst earthquake in its recorded history.

As people contended with rubble, injuries and lives lost, millions of Burmese — many of whom are displaced or in exile — desperately sought news from their loved ones. But getting reliable information was, and still is, a challenge. Critical damage to the country’s communication infrastructure, on top of long-standing military-imposed internet restrictions, means information from the ground has been particularly hard to come by. As a result, many turned to Facebook for updates.

As it has done for all major crisis since the launch of the product in 2017, Facebook activated its Crisis Response Center. You've probably seen it before. If a hurricane or earthquake hit near you or one of your Facebook friends, you would have been prompted to mark yourself safe, or seen notifications either on your newsfeed or when searching related keywords. Besides keeping you abreast of your friends’ safety status, the dedicated Crisis Response page includes a help section as well as a dedicated newsfeed and news and video sections, featuring posts related to the crisis.

Giving people access to a centralized information center in a time of crisis sounds great. In practice, however, Facebook’s Crisis Response Center is a cesspool for scam and misinformation that does more to fuel users’ fears and anxieties than to help people navigate crises.

As the European Commission explores the development of crisis protocols, under article 48 of the DSA, we felt it important to capture exactly where Meta's Crisis Response tool currently fails.

The safety check features enables people to mark themselves safe and broadcast their safety status to all of their Facebook friends.
The idea: inform everyone with one click, reducing the need for extensive outreach and limiting adverse impact on communication networks.
The problem: In addition to providing viewers with information on which of their Facebook friends have been “marked safe” or “not marked safe yet”, Facebook provides an option to “Ask if safe”. When selected, this option sends a prompt to the person in question, and adjusts their safety check status by broadcasting how many people have so far requested information on their situation. This latter information can be particularly anxiety-inducing, at a time when anxiety already runs high.
Recommendation: Stick to categorizing people as either “marked safe” and “not marked safe yet” and avoid publicly singling out individuals who have failed to respond to specific friends’ safety check requests.

The support request feature allows people to offer or solicit help from their network, their extended network, or the broader public.
The idea: Do you have a need for water, food, medicine, shelter, transport? The tool helps you broadcast your needs and facilitates connection with people offering help.
The problem: The support request feature, which encourages people to get in direct contact with the poster, appears – by our observations – to be un-moderated. As a result, we found the feature to be broadcasting a number of questionable posts, including various scams and misinformation narratives.
Recommendation: Introduce a clear vetting process for support requests, with only vetted posts making it to the dedicated help section of the Crisis Response Center.

The Crisis Response Center offers various information sections: a newsfeed, safety tips, a short brief on the crisis, and a news and video feature sections.
The idea: To make it easier to access information on the crisis, all in one place.
The problem: As with the help requests, the posts seem – by our observations – to be un-moderated. Among the content we found featured in the Myanmar earthquake Crisis Response Center: pieces of content which Facebook had otherwise marked as AI-generated misinformation, various posts appearing to capitalize on the crisis for engagement and revenue, and many posts in non-relevant foreign languages which were clearly not intended for the impacted audiences. By failing to adequately moderate its Crisis Response Center, Facebook is exacerbating misinformation and confusion, instead of relaying reliable information.
Recommendation: Avoid displaying content from actors with a history of policy violations. Manually review all content featured in the Crisis Response Center.

Access to reliable information is a critical need during crises, as people navigate life threatening decisions and coordinate crisis response.

Platforms have long known that crises significantly increase the risk of misinformation and scams circulating on their services, in large part due to financially motivated actors capitalizing on heightened engagement rates to cash in on advertising and people’s desperation. These risks are especially prominent in situations where information from the ground is scarce, and communication difficult, as has been the case in Myanmar.

Social media crisis response services, such as the Facebook Crisis Center, can play an essential role relaying reliable information to people in crisis by drawing people’s attention to credible, vetted information. Done poorly, however, these same crisis response tools can aggravate the situation and further exacerbate existing risks to people’s physical and mental safety and well-being.