When a 15-year-old girl was recently killed in a weekend car accident in New Brunswick, Canada, residents did not get the news about her death from TV, radio, or the newspaper. Most people first heard about it on Facebook. The Canadian province is very rural, broadcasters are off-air during the weekend, and the newspaper would not print a story until the following Monday.
New Brunswick AMBER Alert Coordinator Todd Chadwick also saw the social networking site as the best way to instantly notify people when a child is abducted. "A lot of people rely on Facebook to get their local news," said Chadwick. "Our whole purpose was for quick dissemination, getting the message out as fast as possible."
New Brunswick has a population of 750,000, and Chadwick said more than two-thirds of the residents are signed up on Facebook.
However, Chadwick wanted to make sure the integrity of the AMBER Alert program was not put in jeopardy by adding a Facebook page. The AMBER Alert page does not contain advertising, and people are not allowed to post comments. "We just wanted to push the message out, not take information back in," said Chadwick. "It is not a place to do research about AMBER Alert or to locate child safety information. It is just a tool to get the word out about an AMBER Alert."
Ontario and Prince Edward Island have since launched official AMBER Alert pages as well.
An AMBER Alert has never been issued in New Brunswick, but Chadwick encourages residents to sign up for the AMBER Alert page in case it is needed. "As soon as we issue the AMBER Alert, it will immediately go to the Facebook page," said Chadwick. "They can go to the page and/or forward it to others. We can have an official message that is very powerful. So far, we have 27,000 people signed up."