Over the years, people have relied on Facebook to help search for missing person cases, and it has proved to be a success as people are encouraged to help the community. In an effort to combat child abduction and human trafficking, world’s most used social media platform Facebook is taking a step further by partnering up with Polis Diraja Malaysia (PDRM) to implement a National Urgent Response (NUR) Alerts programme.
Its mission is to notify the Facebook community when such cases occur, in which an alert system will be sent to people’s Facebook News Feed if they are in the designated search area of the missing child. The NUR alert system enables Facebook users to view the info of the missing child and share it among their friends, where they can find important details of the victim, such as photo, description, geo-tagged location of where the child went missing and more relevant information to further aid the search.
The program was officiated by Facebook’s Trust & Safety Director, Emily Vacher who vowed to increase the awareness of the missing victims and reunite them back to the safe hands of their respective families as soon as possible with the help of the NUR alert system.
Big applause to Facebook for its effort to protect children at risk and its commitment in making the world a better place. As everyone knows, social media is truly powerful, so without a doubt, the collaboration between PDRM and Facebook is a good use of technology and we hope it will effectively expedite catching the bad guys.