Facebook has a new initiative - bringing children home. According to USA Today, the company will use its 185 million US users to help find missing children via the distribution of Amber Alert messages on news feeds.

The program launched this past Tuesday, and is in partnership with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC). It will deliver the most complete information available, including photographs. It will also geographically pinpoint incoming alerts so they appear in timelines of Facebook users who are near the search area. Users will not have to sign up for the service, and are likely to see one or two alerts a year.

USA Today reports that since Amber Alerts began running in 2003, they have helped police find 728 children. Issuing alerts on Facebook has the potential to help locate even more.

According to NPR, Facebook has often helped to find and bring children home in the past. Emily Vacher, Facebook's trust and safety manager, stated, "We were actually really inspired by people who already use Facebook for this purpose...

We've noticed over the last couple of years that when kids go missing, people started posting about this on their Facebook pages to share information within their own communities. And we saw a lot of successes out of this. Kids have actually been brought home because of the information people shared on Facebook."

She continued, "Amber Alerts are very rare occurrences... So when you see one of these on Facebook, take a couple of minutes to read the alert, to share the information with your friends and family, and just pay attention to your surroundings, because a tip that you may find may actually result in reuniting a child with their family."

NCMEC founder John Walsh stated that the new Facebook initiative "puts a whole army of civilians out there, looking." Walsh's own son Adam was abducted and murdered in 1981.

Walsh said, "I'm sure someone would have seen something if they only knew to look for it, so please, look at these pictures. Be observant. That's a child who is in grave danger, and if you see something, take the time to make the call. That's the way we get children back alive."