Instagram Rolls Out New Amber Alert Feature on International Missing Children's Day
Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Instagram
Amber Alerts are coming to Instagram in an effort to help find missing children across the globe.
Starting Wednesday, the social media platform began rolling out the new feature that allows users "to see and share notices of missing children in their area," according to a new blog post written by Emily Vacher, Director of Trust and Safety at Meta, Instagram's parent company.
The new feature, announced after International Missing Children's Day, will be made "fully available" in the U.S. and two dozen other countries over the next couple of weeks.
"We know that the chances of finding a missing child increase when more people are on the lookout, especially in the first few hours," Vacher wrote in her blog post. "With this update, if an AMBER Alert is activated by law enforcement and you are in the designated search area, the alert will now appear in your Instagram feed."
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Amber Alerts on Instagram will include several key details, including items like "a photo, description, location of the abduction and any other available information that can be provided" regarding the missing child. The area-specific notifications will also be made shareable with friends on the platform "to further spread the word."
"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)," Vacher explained in Wednesday's announcement.
Various international organizations — including the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) in the U.S., the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, the National Crime Agency in the U.K., the Attorney General's Office in Mexico and the Australian Federal Police — teamed up with Instagram to develop the concept.
Michelle DeLaune, President and CEO at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, believes Instagram is "a perfect fit" for the program as "a platform based on the power of photos."
"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," DeLaune added.
Instagram now joins Facebook, also owned by Meta, in issuing the missing children alerts on its platform. Facebook first began sending out the notifications in 2015 and "have assisted in hundreds of successful child endangerment cases in the US and around the world" as a result, Vacher said in her blog post.
According to Vacher, Facebook's alerts have helped solve missing child cases in both Florida and Massachusetts dating back to 2016 and 2020, respectively.
"AMBER Alerts are an important way we can support our communities in keeping children safe, and we look forward to continuing this work," Vacher wrote.
In addition to the U.S., Amber Alerts will be issued via Instagram in 24 countries: 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 U.K. and the United Arab Emirates.
"We're working to expand and bring them to more countries," Vacher said in her blog post.
