Missing girl's father finds help through Twitter
A 14-year-old girl named McKenzie Church has gone missing, and Twitter is being used to spread the word of her disappearance and hopefully find someone who knows where she is.
If you've been on Twitter Tuesday, you've probably seen a tweet similar to "retweet: @genochurch's 14 yr old daughter is missing" followed by a link to Genochurch's blog post asking for help in finding his missing daughter. At first glance, it seems like a simple "retweet" seen almost daily on Twitter. But after some digging, you'll quickly find that it's spreading across the service at an extremely rapid rate.
In fact, "please retweet" and "Twitter Amber Alert" are two of the most popular search terms on Twitter. A quick search of "genochurch" on the service's search page yields thousands of results, which are being updated constantly. In a 30-second stint, the site updated the results pages with tweets containing the username a whopping 40 times.
According to Rob Church, his daughter McKenzie was last seen Saturday around Greenville, S.C. He's unsure where his daughter went, but he believes she may be with her 17-year-old boyfriend, Ryan Schichtel, in his 1997 Honda Accord.
McKenzie Church is not listed on the government's Amber Alert page, but a news report by a local TV station in the Greenville area mentions that the girl has gone missing. It does point out, though, that authorities believe she is in no danger.
"Greenville County deputies told us the missing girl is being treated as a runaway," Greenville's WSPA CBS channel reported. "Her friend is not considered a runaway because of his age. Deputies do not feel the pair is in danger."
Although a number of Twitter "campaigns" have developed over the past year, most were confined to a small group on the service. But this unprecedented response on the part of the Twitter community to help Church find his missing daughter is attracting Twitter users from across the globe and has quickly swept across the service.
There's no telling if the help Church is receiving from Twitter will bring his daughter back home, but it certainly highlights an important point: Twitter cannot only connect people in a community, it can harness the power of that community for something far more important than telling others what you had for dinner last night.
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
In this case, she's not even kidnapped or lost. She is a runaway. It's sad, but should twitter be using up what little karma it has for these efforts on a runaway. Each successive person to try this will get geometrically decreasing returns.
She may "only" be a runaway, but that doesn't mean she is not in danger or that her parent's are any less worried.
Please take the time to at least check this story out, and see if there is anything you can do to help.
KarenKramer and
Nikki Maven
http://www.parentinghelpme.com
By the way, to those asking about AMBER Alerts, none can be issued in this case because it's a runaway situation, not an abduction.
- by erinm33 October 17, 2008 7:29 AM PDT
- yea this is actually a true story. i know the girl, and i went to the school both were from. so yea. but they've been found.
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