Using Facebook to Find Missing Persons: A Crowd-Sourcing Perspective

Part 8: e-Society and Online Communities International audience 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.