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Art Mann
Guest
It will be interesting to discover whether social media helps solve this case.
By Matthew Van Dongen | Hamilton Spectator
The search for a missing Ancaster man has morphed into a massive social media effort taken up by celebrities, web sleuths and thousands of others across Ontario, on and off the web.
Family and friends of Tim Bosma created a Help Find Tim Bosma event page on Facebook when the 32-year-old went missing Monday night after taking two prospective buyers for a test-drive in his black pickup truck.
By Wednesday evening, more than 3,400 people had "attended" the Facebook event, adding thousands of comments of support, offers of help and, occasionally, armchair investigative tips.
Mentions of Bosma's name also exploded on Twitter. At one point, a Twitter user from Peterborough asked well-known singer Jann Arden to retweet a photo of Bosma's missing persons poster to her 68,000 followers. Her "RT" was subsequently retweeted to 440,000 followers by satirical CBC heavyweight Rick Mercer.
"It can blow up like that, under the right circumstances," said Jerrie Dean, a California-based missing persons advocate who blogs about cases across the country. "In my opinion, that's a good thing – as long as you're passing on good information."
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