Facebook connects government, UN health agencies to Messenger developers
24 March, 2020
Government health organisations and UN health agencies including the WHO (World Health Organisation) will soon be able to use Facebook Messenger to widely reach the general public with messages to combat the coronavirus outbreak.
Facebook said it could hook up government and UN officials using its developer partners who'll help them use Messenger “most effectively to scale their response to COVID-19”.
The developers’ services will be offered free to these organisations.
The developers will teach medical officials how “to talk about timely information with local communities and speed up their replies to commonly asked questions with tools like automated responses,” Facebook said.
Facebook is also separately encouraging developers on its platform to build messaging answers to disseminate accurate information on precautions that the general public must take, such as for example social distancing.
To incentivise the development of novel messaging answers to spread authenticated information to the general public, and likely stem the sharing of false or misleading news, Facebook is getting developers to work within a time-frame by announcing an online hackathon.
Winners will be mentored by Facebook to greatly help build up their ideas into actual solutions.
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