Earlier at the beginning of this year, Facebook launched an AMBER Alert in partnership with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to find missing and abducted children. Today announcing in Facebook post-Mark Zuckerberg said they are expanding this service in Canada in a mission to find missing children.
Zuckerberg writes with AMBER Alerts on Facebook they already have recovered Victoria, the missing child. He also posted the child’s photo in his post “who was abducted last year from a hospital in Trois Rivières, Québec, and safely returned to her parents after someone in our community saw an alert on Facebook”.
People receive an alert in their News Feed with photographs and other details when a child is missing or abducted. First implemented in the US back in January with this feature, people can share the alert with friends and link directly to the National Center’s missing child poster, which always produces the most up-to-date information about the case.
Social media has become a crucial part of our life. Facebook has 1.44 billion users in the world and is taking some great initiatives for the goodwill of society- from Safety Check to AMBER alert.
Here is how it works
If a child disappears from your area, the local police authority analyses if the case qualifies for AMBER Alert and is passed to National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to issue the alert.
By the time people of the targeted area get to see the pop-up of the Alert in their news feed, including a photograph of the missing child, a license plate number, the name and description of the child and suspected abductor, and can share the information with their friend.
Facebook says as of now, 725 children have been recovered as a direct result of AMBER Alerts since the program launched in 1996.
