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Celebrities Take to Twitter to Do What the Media Won’t: Shine a Light on the Missing D.C. Girls

Posted byBy Kiersten Willis | Published on: CommentsComments (0)

Chaka Khan, Taraji P. Henson and Sean “Diddy” Combs actively share personal and professional details on social media. (@ChakaKhan Twitter/Wikimedia Commons)

A growing list of celebrities is using social media to magnify the search for the missing Washington, D.C. girls, Chaka Khan, Taraji P. Henson and Sean “Diddy” Combs among them.

Viral tweets beginning Sunday, March 12, initially spurred heightened support for the sudden increase in missing Black and Latino girls residing in the D.C. area. As previously reported, 10 girls went missing within two weeks and three other Black teens have since been reported missing.

Chaka Khan seemed to link human trafficking to the girls’ disappearance, but D.C.’s ‎Metropolitan Police Department spokeswoman Karimah Bilal told NBC4 they left their locations voluntarily. Bilal said there was no evidence to suggest there is a human trafficking issue in the area.

Kerry Washington, Diddy, Ava DuVernay and LL Cool J also have tweeted to bring awareness to the issue.

https://twitter.com/diddy/status/845329090135670786

https://twitter.com/ava/status/845221712052416514

Taraji P. Henson shared that 14 D.C. girls went missing within 24 hours, but police told NBC4 that post is inaccurate. Still, Henson using her Instagram account to shed light on the issue spurred thousands of comments and likes.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BSBcMVJDn8l/

Gabrielle Union posted a video that read, “Wake up, our young women are disappearing.” She captioned the clip by urging the public to “demand equal coverage of ALL missing children from the media” and indicated that any child — regardless of race — “deserves all of our collective effort to bring them home.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/BSERbF8AwNj/

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