A longitudinal approach to understanding missing persons publicity appeals on Twitter

• In Event: Methodologies - Advances in Evaluative Research

Abstract

Publicity appeals for missing persons are regularly used for gathering vital information from the public and raising awareness about missing persons. Social media platforms are frequently used by law enforcement and the national Missing People Charity in the UK in order to distribute appeals and appeal to the general public for help in the search for missing persons. In this study, we used an automatic web scraping tool to monitor publicity appeals distributed on Twitter by the Missing People Charity in the UK. The account was scraped between May 2018 and January 2019, resulting in N=377 appeals. Demographic characteristics and publicity appeal type was coded for all appeals (e.g. age, gender, location). Social network data was also collected during this period which assessed Twitter accounts engaging with the Missing People account and analysed in terms of size of network, type of account and number of mentions. These data were used to explore whether different types of accounts mentioning the charity had any impact on engagement of publicity appeals during the same time period. The results are discussed in the context of social media practices which can promote higher engagement for organizations releasing publicity appeals for missing persons. Further recommendations are made with regards to removing appeals after a particular time frame.

Authors

• Simona Ciobotaru, University of Portsmouth

• Carl Adams, Mobi Publishing

• Craig John Robert Collie, University of Portsmouth

• Karen Shalev Greene, University of Portsmouth