Amber Alerts will now appear in users’ Instagram feeds.
Meta partnered with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to bring Amber Alerts to Instagram, the company announced Wednesday. These alerts, which are used to identify missing children, will now appear on the platform in 25 countries as part of a partnership with NCMEC and several other international law enforcement agencies.
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“Instagram is a platform based on the power of photos, making it a perfect fit for the Amber Alert program,” NCMEC President Michelle DeLaune said in a Meta Newsroom blog post. “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.”
The alerts will include pertinent information, including photos, descriptions, and the last locations of the abductions. Amber Alerts are typically provided to users based on their location. In order for the app to determine if an Amber Alert is applicable, it will use several sources of data to determine the user’s location, including IP addresses and location services.
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Amber Alerts have been on Facebook since 2015. This addition has “assisted in hundreds of successful child endangerment cases in the U.S. and around the world,” according to Meta.
Amber Alerts have helped recover several children from abductions. The Amber Alert program has contributed to the recovery of 1,114 children since 2006, according to the Justice Department. An estimated 7 in 10 children are successfully reunited with their parents after an Amber Alert is released, according to an analysis from Protection1.com.
