At the beginning of the year, a new action dedicated to advocating for the introduction of the Amber Alert system in Serbia, which was initiated by Igor Juric and his Center for Missing and Abused Children, attracted a lot of public attention on social networks, and then in the media. Amber Alert is a system that helps in finding missing children or people who kidnapped them. It was established for the first time in the United States in 1996 after the disappearance of the girl Amber Hagerman, and involves the immediate interruption of television and radio programs, sending notifications and SMS to citizens, publishing information useful for finding the child on billboards, highways, ATMs…
The public action, launched on January 11 this year, is followed by the hashtag #hocemoamberalert. However, part of the public opposed Igor Juric’s campaign and soon established a narrative according to which paedophiles, the deep state led by the Clintons, John Podesta, Laura Silsby-Gayler and others are allegedly behind the Amber Alert.
Amber Alert and Sasa Borojevic
Probably the most worthy person for the placement of conspiracy theories about the Amber Alert is Sasa Borojevic, whose claims about various other topics, such as vaccination and Covid-19, have been repeatedly evaluated by fact-checking web portals as false, unfounded or conspiratorial (1, 2, 3…). This time, a manipulatively cut video of his guest appearance on Happy television from two years ago spread on the social network TikTok. The video, in which he crossed paths with Igor Juric, whose statements were omitted, was seen by more than half a million people.
In the disputed video, Borojevic claims that “John Podesta and the Clinton family are behind the Amber Alert” and “Trump accused them of child trafficking and human trafficking”, that the Amber Alert is “the property of a private person” and that “it is very dangerous to introduce someone else’s software by a private company”. Borojevic also insinuates that the company Amber Ready is behind the entire Amber Alert system. However, according to the analyzes of the fact-checking web portals Raskrikavanje and Istinomer, these statements do not correspond to the truth.
As Raskrikavanje writes, the company Amber Ready did cooperate with the Podesta Group, which conducted a PR campaign for them related to the marketing of the application. The purpose of this application is to create an Amber profile of children that contains basic information and photos. This profile is stored exclusively in the parents’ devices, and the goal is to send information faster and easier if a child goes missing. However, the company Amber Ready has been dealing with this business since 2009, while the Amber Alert already existed a long time ago. Istinomer also reminds us that the Podesta Group has not existed since 2017.
Also, what was cut from the manipulative recording, and what Igor Juric draws attention to, is that the Amber Alert system is not owned by a private company. The Amber Alert is under the control of the US Department of Justice and is coordinated by the Office of the Attorney General. In the USA, there is already a system through which notifications and SMS are sent to citizens, and it is managed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Raskrikavanje points out. Both Igor Juric and Sasa Borojevic in the show on TV Happy (from which the manipulative video was taken) are actually advocating for the development of Serbian software that would be similar to the Amber Alert.
Sasa Borojevic in the world of disinformation
Sasa Borojevic is, by the way, known for spreading various disinformation and conspiracy theories, and he attracted the attention of the general public, especially during the coronavirus pandemic. Fact-checking organizations have repeatedly debunked his unfounded claims and disinformation, such as that it is a “plandemic”, that vaccinated people are not recommended to travel by plane because of blood clots, that in England most of the vaccinated die from the coronavirus, and he planted and misinterpreted statistics regarding coronavirus mortality. At the same time, he was one of the promoters of ivermectin as a therapy against the coronavirus.
Since he presents himself as a fighter for children’s rights, children are another frequent topic of his Facebook posts and public appearances. Raskrikavanje noted Borojevic’s speculation that a Belgrade chain of stores sells “pedophile shirts”, and FakeNews Tragac wrote about his claims that the diphtheria vaccine is linked to leukaemia in children. In a series of articles, this web portal also debunked several incorrect claims that Borojevic and the controversial pulmonologist and conspiracy theorist Branimir Nestorovic presented at a press conference last year, presenting their so-called Association for the protection of children “Knights of the order of the dragon”. At that conference, they uttered a series of disinformation concerning suicide, children’s rights, gender reassignment, social networks, people with disabilities, the Amber Alert, sexual education, paedophilia and incest.
Laura Silsby-Gayler and AlertSense
Shortly after the controversial recording of Sasa Borojevic’s appearance on TikTok spread on social networks, Facebook users started another unfounded narrative based on the premise that persons convicted of human trafficking, specifically children, are behind the Amber Alert. In one of the posts from this social network, it is claimed that Laura Silsby Gayler was “criminally prosecuted for trafficking children from Haiti, after which she became the head of the Amber Alert system”. The post was shared with a photo that raises the question of whether Laura Silsby, who is accused of child trafficking and Laura Gayler, who is the deputy director of marketing at AlertSense, are the same person.
The correct answer is that they are. Gayler is just the married name of Laura Silsby, who married Norman Gayler in 2015. She was actually prosecuted on charges of child trafficking after the 2010 Haiti earthquake but was eventually convicted of organizing an illegal trip (1). However, although the company AlertSense, where Silsby now works, really deals with software for alerting citizens to emergencies, it is not a company behind Amber Alert, nor is there such a thing as a “boss of Amber Alert”. As already mentioned, Amber Alert is a system controlled by the US Department of Justice and coordinated by the Office of the Assistant State Attorney. Maruin Heneberg and Amy L. Solomon are currently in that office, so they are the closest to the position of “head of Amber Alert”.
