Instagram adds Amber Alerts for missing kids in your feed

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Instagram has begun rolling out a new feature that will push Amber Alerts to users’ feeds to help find missing children in their area.

These alerts will be limited by location and are rolling out to U.S. users now. The plan is to expand the feature to 25 countries in the coming weeks.

The platform announced its new plans in a blog post earlier this week. Some users may have already seen Amber Alerts in their Instagram feed, as the new feature began rolling out yesterday.

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But this isn’t the first time that Meta, Instagram’s parent company, has added Amber Alerts to one of its platforms. The company added the alerts to Facebook back in 2015 in an effort to bring the news of missing children to more people’s eyes.

Adding Amber Alerts to Instagram will be a great way to spread the word even further. First of all, Instagram is primarily a visual app, with users sharing images and videos constantly.

And one of the ways that Amber Alerts help the most is by providing images of missing kids that will now show up right on your Instagram feed.

Additionally, Instagram’s user base is much younger. Many people who don’t use Facebook do use Instagram. That means that Amber Alerts could potentially reach far more users now that Meta will also push them to Instagram.

The social platform will send out Amber Alerts based on location. If you see one pop up on your feed, that means that there is a missing child somewhere near you. You can then share the post to help it reach even more people.

This is a great move from Instagram and I’m surprised it didn’t happen a lot sooner. But at least now the platform can leverage its more than one billion users to help find missing kids in the case of an Amber Alert.

Have any thoughts on this? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

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