Battle Observer Comment

Although the child was found safe and well not more than 15 minutes after the alarm was raised, by then a police appeal on social networking website Twitter had spread like wildfire across the UK.

The alert had been passed on, or ‘Re-Tweeted’ by a number of people, making Battle Police and the missing girl one of the top trending topics of the evening.

There seems to have been a bit of a Twitter backlash in the national media in recent months, with one user jailed for racially abusing a celebrity over the website and a number of others arrested for allegedly breaching a court order preventing the identification of a rape victim.

But whereas these incidents have shown Twitter at its worst, this tale of the public rallying round to find a missing child has shown the better side of human nature.

Over the last couple of years Sussex Police has embraced Twitter as a way of getting its message out there to the public.

And as this recent incident shows, they appear to be doing a Stirling job.