Facebook has taken its campaign to boost organ donations to Canada and Mexico. The feature allows Facebook users to tell their friends and family that they are registered organ donors and it directs people who are not currently signed up as organ donors to the official registries where they live. Between May 1 and the middle of September, around 275,000 Facebook users posted their donor status on the site. “It shows the enormous potential of social media,” said Blair Sadler, an attorney and a senior fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. He suggests that Facebook’s new feature has the potential to revolutionize the field of organ transplantation because large numbers of people will be expressing publicly what they want to happen to their organs after they die. People are more prone to be influenced by their friends or family than by activists or public health officials.
