Using Facebook to Find Missing Persons: A Crowd-Sourcing Perspective
This paper explores the ways in which Facebook is used in the quest for finding missing persons in South Africa. Graphs are used to indicate differentiated roles of the Facebook communities: some communities act mainly as originators of the messages where
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Abstract. This paper explores the ways in which Facebook is used in the quest for finding missing persons in South Africa. Graphs are used to indicate differentiated roles of the Facebook communities: some communities act mainly as originators of the messages whereas others act more as distributors or end points of the messages. Crowd-sourcing is used as a conceptual tool to further our understanding of the way messages are shared among different Facebook communities. The four pillars of crowdsourcing as proposed by Hosseini et al., are used to analyse the network of communities as a crowd-source system. It is argued that Facebook can be effective as crowdsourcing system despite the fact that there is no guarantee that missing persons reported there will be found, since it most likely provides much needed emotional support to friends and relatives of the missing person. Keywords: Crowdsourcing Emotional support
Social media
Facebook
Missing people
1 Introduction “A child goes missing in South Africa every five hours” [1]. This alarming fact is not just restricted to children and also not to just South Africa, but is a world-wide problem. Scoop [2] reported in 2013 that 4,432,880 people have disappeared in the past 20 years worldwide. The ubiquity of technology gives people/organisations additional tools to assist in the search for missing people. Centralized databases (registers) can be constructed and information can be shared with ease [3]. Previously, this type of information was usually controlled and distributed through formalized organisations such as the law enforcement services. However, with the rise in the uptake of social media, ordinary citizens can now contribute to the search of missing persons through Web 2.0 technologies. In South Africa, the social media platform adoption has changed significantly. The 2014 World Wide Worx and Fuseware report [4] has indicated that Facebook is the biggest social media platform in South Africa. The report indicated that there are 9.4 million active Facebook users in South Africa in 2014 compared to 6.8 million users in 2013. People use these social media platforms to create social networks. However, these social networks can now be used as a problem solving tool, where a problem is being “outsourced” to the “crowd”, this is known as crowdsourcing [5]. Taking the problem solving abilities of networks of people in consideration this study is attempting to answer the following question: How do people use social media © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2016 Published by Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016. All Rights Reserved Y.K. Dwivedi et al. (Eds.): I3E 2016, LNCS 9844, pp. 685–694, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-45234-0_61
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M.J. Hattingh and M.C. Matthee
platforms, such as Facebook, to aid the search of missing persons? This problem is approached from a crowd-sourcing perspective. Crowds usually originates as an undefined network of people that contribute to a particular task [5]. We answer the research questi
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