AMBER Alerts Will Now Appear on Your Instagram Feed

As a parent, there's no worse nightmare than your child's safety being in jeopardy. We'd all agree that when a child goes missing, any support possible to bring them home makes an important difference. AMBER Alerts are familiar to most of us—our smartphones will blast out an important update when a child in our area has been abducted and crucial, identifying information gets shared in an effort spread the word about the crisis.

Now, AMBER Alerts will be shared via another medium many of us spend much time on: Instagram. In a press release, the platform announced it will launch the alerts starting May 25, 2022— coinciding with Global Missing Children's Day—citing that Facebook has proven to be a successful means to share alerts in the past, with hundreds of kids being located worldwide since the feature became available six years ago.

Michelle DeLaune, President and CEO at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, an organization involved in launching this vital effort, noted in the press release that Instagram's very purpose means it's a natural fit for creating awareness when a child goes missing. "Instagram is a platform based on the power of photos, making it a perfect fit for the AMBER Alert program," she said, adding, "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."

In addition to photos of missing kids, an alert will also contain identifying details and the circumstances of the abduction such as location or any other facts known at that time. If you see an alert in your feed, that means a child has gone missing in your specific area, indicating there's an active search underway. If you think you can help, spread the alert by sharing it with your local friends on Instagram. The feature will go live in 25 countries in the coming weeks, with the hope that AMBER Alerts will become available in many more areas around the world in the near future.

Ultimately, as much as we love seeing snaps of exotic locations or enjoy keeping up with what our favorite celebs are doing on Instagram, we applaud this important new effort, which means more kids like 11-year-old Charlotte Moccia, who was found with the help of an AMBER Alert shared on Facebook, will come home as soon as possible.