ABSTRACT

Police agencies globally are seeing an increase in reports of people going missing. These people are often vulnerable, and their safe and early return is a key factor in preventing them from coming to serious harm. One approach to quickly find missing people is to disseminate appeals for information using social media. Yet despite the popularity of twitter-based missing person appeals, presently little is known about how to best construct these messages to ensure they are shared widely. This paper aims to build an evidence-base for understanding how police accounts tweet appeals for information about missing persons, and how the public engage with these tweets by sharing them. We analyse 1008 Tweets made by Greater Manchester Police between the period of 2011 and 2018 in order to investigate what features of the tweet, the twitter account, and the missing person are associated with levels of retweeting. We find that tweets with different choice of image, wording, sentiment, and hashtags vary in how much they are retweeted. Tweets that use custody images have lower retweets than Tweets with regular photos, while tweets asking the question ‘have you seen … ?’ and asking explicitly to be retweeted have more engagement in the form of retweets. These results highlight the need for conscientious, evidence-based crafting of missing appeals, and pave the way for further research into the causal mechanisms behind what affects engagement, to develop guidance for police forces worldwide.

摘要

全球各地的警察机构都发现有人失踪的报告有所增加。这些人往往很脆弱，他们的安全和早日返回是防止他们受到严重伤害的关键因素。快速找到失踪人员的一种方法是使用社交媒体传播对信息的呼吁。然而，尽管基于 Twitter 的失踪人员呼吁很受欢迎，但目前人们对如何最好地构建这些消息以确保它们被广泛共享知之甚少。本文旨在建立一个证据基础，以了解警方帐户如何在推特上呼吁有关失踪人员的信息，以及公众如何通过分享这些推文来参与其中。我们分析了大曼彻斯特警方在 2011 年至 2018 年期间发布的 1008 条推文，以调查推文、推特账户、失踪人员与转发水平有关。我们发现，具有不同图像、措辞、情感和主题标签选择的推文在转发量方面有所不同。使用监护权图片的推文比使用普通照片的推文转发量要低，而推文则问“你见过……？”这个问题。并明确要求转推以转推的形式获得更多参与。这些结果强调了认真、以证据为基础的上诉缺失的必要性，并为进一步研究影响参与的因果机制铺平了道路，为世界各地的警察部队制定指导。使用监护权图片的推文比使用普通照片的推文转发量要低，而推文则问“你见过……？”这个问题。并明确要求转推以转推的形式获得更多参与。这些结果强调了认真、以证据为基础的上诉缺失的必要性，并为进一步研究影响参与的因果机制铺平了道路，为世界各地的警察部队制定指导。使用监护权图片的推文比使用普通照片的推文转发量要低，而推文则问“你见过……？”这个问题。并明确要求转推以转推的形式获得更多参与。这些结果强调了认真、以证据为基础的上诉缺失的必要性，并为进一步研究影响参与的因果机制铺平了道路，为世界各地的警察部队制定指导。