In 375 videos featured on Facebook by The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, the average views on posts about white girls was more than 63,000; for Black girls, it was 38,300.
Ideally, she said, that should cause people to engage more with posts about Black girls.
But advocates say getting more people to interact with social media posts about missing kids remains an important goal. One unpublished study of missing adults, which is still undergoing review, indicated that paying to boost the number of impressions on Facebook could improve the odds of recovery. Tanesha Howard holds a photo of her 15-year-old daughter, Joniah Walker, near her home in Milwaukee on Sept. 14. Howard last saw her daughter at about 2:30 p.m. June 23 near the intersection of East Reservoir Avenue and North Buffum Street.
Milwaukee news media also covered the case, including two stories about Joniah that appeared on the website of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, a member of the USA TODAY Network. The websites of local TV stations affiliated with ABC, Fox and NBC also carried her story, according to a Google search. There was no national media coverage.
The difference between the two realities may be negligible anyway since, once out on the street, kids who run away often face the same dangers as those abducted, said Michael Hill, the center’s director of digital and social media. “Many missing persons’ cases involve juveniles who are suspected to have left home voluntarily,” Jeanis wrote. “This may make the victim seem less vulnerable and their behavior may be regarded as deviant, both of which may decrease engagement.”
On May 31, about a year after Kamaria vanished, the center posted a video about her disappearance that said, in part: “Kamaria Johnson, now 17, has been #missing for a year but to her mom it seems like eternity.” The video received about 18,000 views, fewer than most posts, but near average for posts about Black children missing more than a year.
Posts about Black children missing more than a year on average received half the number of views as posts about Black children missing a year or less. For posts about white children, views dropped by nearly a third after a year. Police told John Rex they wouldn’t issue an Amber Alert — emergency information about a missing child sent directly to phones, electronic signs and the media — because their mother took them, the father said. In some states, that's a policy.
A new post on the first anniversary of the girls’ disappearance drew just over 20,000 views and another in February, nearly two years after Hanna and Skye disappeared, slightly more than 14,000.
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