To ask you to inform the police instead

[Annoyingwurringnoise]

I’m forever seeing appeals for missing people on local Facebook groups. I’m always a bit suspicious when the OP says police are searching for the person, but if you know anything message the OP directly. Surely if police are searching, it would be better to inform the police, get the information firsthand to them? Facebook randoms don’t know why this person has left their home, they may have left for a very good reason, they may be fleeing domestic abuse for all we know.

AIBU to ask you, if you do see one of these posts, and you do have an idea of where one of these people is, to tell the police directly? Surely the aim of these posts is to find the missing person, and the police are the best placed to do that and protect the missing person if they need it?

There has been a surge of these missing person/child/dog posts lately, many of them are fake. I have no idea why people are posting them and what they gain from it apart from attention. It's very weird!!

It's really sad isn't it that we become sceptical about things like something so serious 😓

I never share these posts for this very reason

Yes YABU because they do contact the police but the police only really start getting concerned when time passes by depending on the age etc of the person!

social media is a powerful tool that gets around many people that may have seen the missing person!

Often they aren't started by someone directly concerned.
Often they are fake, and the popularity and exposure gained by the post can then be sold as an advertising space.
Sometimes there's a darn good reason for the person to disappear, and unless you know them you may not be helping at all to 'find' them.

Yes, I understand there are lots of scams going round, although what people stand to gain from them I don’t know. Presumably there is something otherwise they wouldn’t do it.

I do see a lot of these types of posts, though, and it’s not unusual for an abuser to use social media to track down their victim, and I do worry that some people are unwittingly handing their victims back over to them. I mean, if it didn’t work, they wouldn’t do it would they?

it’s sad that we have to consider this stuff, but we should. Anybody who genuinely wants to find a loved one would be happy for people to inform the police directly.

I occasionally share missing person posts, but only if they have come direct from the official police FB page for the area, and only if its a very local person or the page says they might have travelled to my area.

Never understand these people who put 'shared in Fife', for someone's cat who has gone missing in Taunton!

I guess some of them are legit, and are just waiting for the person to become 'officially missing' - am thinking about poor Becky Watts dad in Bristol who put lots of posts out very soon after she went missing as he knew something was very wrong

I think it depends. We get a lot where we live as the average age of people in our town is over 60, so a lot go missing who've got early dementia etc, and their children will post saying "dad left home this morning and we don't know where he is" - obviously the police know they've gone missing too and are looking, but it doesn't do harm to share those sorts of posts.
I've also got another friend whose sibling disappears probably every 6 months out of the blue. Just doesn't come home from school/college/uni class and now work. The police again won't take any "interest" now she's a bit older and has done it so many times, but obviously the family want to know if anyone's seen her and if she's ok.

on the other side, my friend's friend has gone missing over Xmas - obviously extremely worrying as he's nowhere to be found - and that I'm a bit more on the fence about. I'm my concern is that the people who are mainly trying to find him are people he owes money to (bad people from what I've heard!) whereas his friends and family are working with police rather than through social media.

Just to explain the scam- like farming. I post a series of cute kitten videos which go viral. I sell the profile to dodgy sweatshop garment supplier, and change the name of the page to 'dodgy sweatshop garment supplier'. All the people who liked and shared the kittens appear to like and have shared dodgy sweatshop supplier, which continues to circulate on the basis of being a hugely popular (but no longer kitten related) series of posts.

Something like that, anyway.

I agree, not everyone who goes "missing" wishes to be found. Best any sighting are logged with the police so they can check it out

You should ALWAYS verify a missing person or 'I'm trying to find long lost friend/relative/neighbour' posts on social media before reposting.

I worked on a case a few years ago where a woman went missing with her dc. The originating fb post was in fact written by her violent husband who did in fact locate her in a refuge and did some very serious harm to her indeed.

Check with the local police websites, or do a Google search (I've seen posts from years before where the person turned up very quickly, or they're re-posted from Australia or America - hardly likely to be in Swindon 5 years later...)

And don't get me started on missing cats hundreds of miles from home...