Facebook’s organ donor initiative looks set to come to its first market in Asia tomorrow, that’s according to Korean news agency Yonhap which reports that the feature will go live for users of the social network in South Korea tomorrow.
The report states that the state-run Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will team up with the social network to give the feature a visible push when it is brought to the country.
As it is a company with truly international reach, Facebook is unlikely to expand the service piecemeal and bring it to Korea alone so we suspect that the country will be one of a number — perhaps from Asia and beyond — that gets the feature for the first time tomorrow. At this stage, however, no details of any such plan have been communicated by the Menlo Park-based company.
Launched in May, the ‘life saving’ initiative, as Facebook called it, has been a huge hit and it has helped swell the ranks of organ donors worldwide. Donor registration numbers jumped by 800 percent in California the day after it launched, while the UK’s NHS saw its own figure more than triple overnight.
The move was widely-praised for the positive change that it is making and, with Facebook rapidly approach 1 billion users, it further demonstrates that the social network is a platform of great influence with the potential to bring about social change worldwide.
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A statement from founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg at the launch of the feature read:
Facebook’s mission is simple: to make the world more open and connected. But the Facebook community has also shown us that simply through sharing and connecting, the world gets smaller and better. Even one individual can have an outsized impact on the challenges facing another, and on the world. At Facebook, we call that the power of friends.
Organ donation is currently available to Facebook users in Australia, Brazil, Columbia, Denmark, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zealand, South Africa, Sweden, UK and the U.S.
To get it, those on the list must ensure that they have a Timeline profile and follow the instructions from the dedicated Facebook Q&A page:
- Click Life Event at the top of your timeline
- Select Health & Wellness
- Select Organ Donor
- Select your audience and click Save
We’ve reached out to Facebook for details of its plans to internationalize the organ donor feature.
Image via Flickr / KSayer1
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