Instagram Will Now Display Amber Alerts to Help Find Missing Children

Meta is expanding its efforts to help find missing children by introducing Amber Alerts into users’ Instagram feeds, where it hopes more people will see them.

Amber Alerts, which get their name from a girl who was abducted and later found murdered in 1996, are a critical way to help law enforcement locate kidnapped children. In the U.S., they’re sent out over the radio, including Internet and satellite radio systems, as well as on television stations and cable TV.

They’re also sent out to iPhone users via the Emergency Alert System, although that’s limited to devices with a SIM card from a supported carrier. It’s also possible to switch these off in some cases; whether you can do so depends on the laws of your country or region.

So, while adding Amber Alerts to Instagram may seem redundant, this does have the potential to ensure they reach a wider audience. Even though Instagram still doesn’t offer an iPad app, many kids and teens still use the app on their iPads, and Instagram can also be accessed from just about any web browser.

Further, as invasive as they are, even Emergency Alerts can be glossed over, particularly since they’re often just a big block of text. On the other hand, Amber Alerts on Instagram will include a photo of the missing child along with additional information, which may attract more attention than a text-based alert.

Instagram is a platform based on the power of photos, making it a perfect fit for the AMBER Alert program. We know that photos are a critical tool in the search for missing children and by expanding the reach to the Instagram audience, we’ll be able to share photos of missing children with so many more people. Michelle DeLaune, President and CEO, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children

Amber Alerts have been available in the Facebook News feed since 2015. However, it’s pretty uncommon to see one there since the alerts themselves are only issued under very specific conditions and only within the geographic area where the child was last seen or believed to be heading. Nevertheless, Meta notes that Amber Alerts on Facebook have “assisted in hundreds of successful child endangerment cases in the U.S. and around the world.”

Further, Amber Alerts are never issued speculatively by law enforcement. Some strict guidelines need to be followed, including the availability of detailed enough descriptive information to make the alert helpful. After all, an alert that says a child was taken in “a white van” will result in many well-meaning but generally useless calls to law enforcement.

This means law enforcement must have “as much descriptive information as possible” about the abducted child, the suspect, and the suspect’s vehicle.

Amber Alerts are also only sent out on a regional basis to folks who are near the location of the abduction since they’re designed to solicit help from the public in locating the suspect. It’s not necessary for someone in Los Angeles to hear about a kidnapping in New York unless the suspect is believed to be traveling to California.

The Amber Alerts that appear in users’ Instagram feeds will follow whatever geographic scope is set by the law enforcement agencies issuing the alerts. In announcing the alerts, Meta notes that it will use as much information as available to determine your location so that you’ll only see relevant Amber Alerts.

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These alerts are rare and specific to the search area. If you get one, it means there is an active search for a missing child nearby. In order to know who to show these alerts to, we use a variety of signals, including the city you list on your profile, your IP address and location services (if you have it turned on).Meta

Meta is rolling out Amber Alerts to Instagram users in the U.S. starting this week and expects to have them available in 25 countries by the end of June, including Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Ecuador, Greece, Guatemala, Ireland, Jamaica, Korea, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Malta, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Romania, South Africa, Taiwan, Ukraine, the UK, and the United Arab Emirates.