Twitter as the new Amber Alert? I’ve been using Twitter pretty consistently this semester, especially since I have it on my phone it’s easy to quickly scan the feed of what people are tweeting about, what’s trending, etc. Something that I came across a while ago but disregarded until now is that Twitter actually has it’s own Twitter account. This seemed a bit odd to me so when I remembered it today I decided to go back and look into what Twitter might have to Tweet about. A lot of the tweets are replies to tweets directed at the Twitter account, or random retweets that also had something to do with Twitter.
The real story, however, lies in the very first tweet that appeared when I went to Twitter’s homepage. Apparently, Twitter is becoming a new and extremely efficient way to send out an Amber Alert when a child goes missing. On April 6, 2011, a 16 year old boy in Saudi Arabia went missing from his home and was found 3 hours later thanks to the Twitter community. Once the news reached Twitter it didn’t take long for the #FaisalDH hashtag to catch on and connect Tweeters to the boys picture and family contact info and aid in his safe return to his family.
On March 30th of this year, Fox News (sorry about it) ran a story about how social-networking sites are the milk cartons of our time for reporting missing children to the community. The networks have the ability to send out mass emails, text messages, and notifications when a child goes missing. The article had a few statistics that I won’t repeat due to my uncertainty of their accurateness, however they did claim that over 95% of Amber Alerts since 2005 have been resolved because of social media.
There are Twitter accounts dedicated to sending out missing children alerts. They’re working on making the alerts geographically relevant to subscribers in hopes that people will subscribe and aid in the recovery of people gone missing. I don’t know how effective I think this will be, but it does have potential to make a major difference in the world and the lives of people that are effected by kidnappings and disappearances of loved ones.
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