A Chinese boy who had been kidnapped three years earlier was found thanks to the nation’s version of Twitter. From NPR,
The message: If China can manage to host the Olympics, why can’t my child be found?
Then Peng turned to the Internet. He blogged and he flooded weibo — the Chinese equivalent of Twitter — with his son’s photo. Journalist Deng Fei from Phoenix Weekly, who has 100,000 followers on weibo, helped in his search.
“At big festivals I kept tweeting his picture, since my followers would be going to their hometowns to celebrate, and I believed the kid had been sold to someone in the countryside,” Deng says.
The family will not press charges against the widow of the man who kidnapped the boy. In fact, if the son still wishes to see the family he was living with, the boy’s real father will allow it. This is an amazing story both because of the power of the Internet and the generosity of the boy’s family.
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