CLEARWATER, Fla. — Many of us spend a lot of time looking at our phones and scrolling through our social media feeds.
It could be where you look for gardening inspiration, beauty tips, a work out, or learn about a friend's milestone or travel destination.
All sorts of content is there in one place, and so are the people. That's why Christopher Gelson and two others decided to turn to social media feeds to help locate missing children.
Gelson said the team launched Protect Your Children Inc. in 2020 with the encompassing goal of protecting children from predators.
Some of their outreach includes education and prevention, but they also aim to find missing children through targeted Facebook and Instagram ads.
"We didn’t see a lot of local focus, and that was the problem," said Gelson.
Last month, they paid for ads featuring Zachary Bernhardt, the 8-year-old boy from Clearwater who went missing on September 11, 2000.
10 Tampa Bay has covered Bernhardt's story extensively over the years, including in 2021 when his grandmother and aunt said his single mother normally worked a night shift but had the night off when he vanished.
“Zachary went to bed that night. He slept in his mother’s bed that night not in his room; and my sister worked nights, so she was trying to stay awake so she could get him off to school the next day," Jimenez said.
"From what I hear, it was a perfectly normal night she left to take down her trash, and she did the cleaning of her house and went for a walk and came back to the apartment and my nephew was gone about 4 o’clock in the morning."
Cadaver dogs, helicopters, and hundreds of people searched the woods around his home.
Over the last two decades, Clearwater police have poured over countless pieces of evidence and followed up on hundreds of leads; but nothing has led to answers about what happened to Bernhardt.
Gelson said their ads, which only appeared in feeds within the Clearwater area, generated a lot of conversation and even led to tips out of Orlando and Mexico. Gelson said they passed those on to police.
"It’s unfortunate but it kind of happens. After so long, they get forgotten about. I think it’s kind of our passion now to bring some of these back to the surface," he said.
Gelson and the team would like to see social media companies do more to promote and actually boost posts about missing children in real time. They spend some of their budget on ads that will reach thousands of people in a very targeted area.
"They could be instrumental in helping to locate kids in a faster way," he said.
Earlier this month, Instagram announced it will now be sharing information about local Amber Alerts with users, in a partnership with several organizations, dedicated to finding and rescuing missing children.