My wife passed away early (36) three years ago today.<p>For a few months, I used her Facebook account to keep in touch with friends and family worldwide about the service, memorials, and the like. At the time, I had quit Facebook myself 3-4 years prior. This was very handy for all of this news dissemination, but then I used Facebook's "memorialize a person" feature to shut down the account for good. This changes the user's name to "Remembering ____ ____", disallows future login or comments on their posts, but leaves all the other content up. I also pulled an archive of everything (especially photos) before doing this.<p>It's honestly something I very rarely think about, probably mostly because I've disavowed Facebook for years now. But I appreciate that Facebook provided this concrete functionality. I still see her name pop up on other social networks on a regular basis (e.g. you and ____ both know ____).
My father passed away a couple of years ago. It was the kind of awkward conversation I never imagined having whereby I had to kindly ask my step-mother to please stop using my deceased father's Facebook account. Granted, I get on extremely well with my step-mother and I've no doubt she meant well - it's quite likely she wanted to continue to use the account as way to remain connected with my father.<p>Nonetheless, it didn't sit well with me (or my brothers) that those not "in the know" would see those posts and not realise that not only was it not my father, but that he was in fact dead.<p>I feel like society is very much in uncharted territory here.
Worse yet a relative of mine passed away almost 10 years ago due to an accident. His "other family" decided to take over his account. They used it to spam insults towards someone who was there during the accident and threw blame for the death. It was disgraceful.<p>There is no way for me to tell Facebook to ban the profile no matter what I tried. I see the same issue on Instagram for very specific issues you cannot report profiles. I even wrote in a textbox "this person is dead!" and Facebook didnt bother. If its an active account its good for business right?<p>In the case of Instagram a music artist I follow got hacked. The Instagram report system is completely useless in this regard. He is a verified user too. Nothing was done and probably nothing will be done. Active accounts are good for business even if they are hacked or diseased peoples accounts (same thing tbh).
One thing I find fascinating, and have not seen discussed, is what will happen to all this data in, say, a couple hundred years.<p>We have tons of diaries from people in 18th and 19th centuries, and they provide a uniquely intimate glimpse of life in the past.<p>If there's any upside to our lives being recorded in such great detail, it's that it will be a treasure trove for our descendants long after we're gone.
Lurker here, apologies for the throwaway acct.<p>Today is the 2 year anniversary of my father's passing. I logged into his FB account a few months after he died and my sister, who was online, saw a login notification and messaged "hello?". I quickly explained that it was me (I was given responsbility for organizing my father's digital assets post-mortem), and instead of being weirded out, she said it was comforting to be messaging with Dad's account and asked to chat for a while (we don't normally communicate much).<p>Slightly off-topic, but a couple related issues I've had that might be useful for others:<p>1. Recently someone impersonated my Dad on FB and starting messaging other family members. We were able to very quickly shut it down using FB's tools to flag impersonating accounts - although it felt particularly offensive to have someone impersonate your dead father for unknown, and likely unsavoury, purposes.<p>2. My dad's main email used a well-known email service that I won't name here but which also has a reputation for relatively poor spam filtering. Going through the incessant 100+ unfiltered daily spam emails from FB, Linkedin, Twitter, bank, airlines, tickets, everywhere he ever shopped, "Don't miss this!" etc in his Inbox made me realize that current screen-attention-capture economy is particularly ill-suited for the declining faculties of older adults. My Dad had early onset dementia and eventually lost the ability to use his email shortly before he passed, but I'd say his experience with the "Internet" in the few years before his passing was made significantly worse through overbearing ads and spam which in retrospect likely took hours of his day to go through as he became less and less able to exert his own agency to avoid. Definitely a regret that I didn't realize this at the time and set up a better system for him, tuned to his age/declining abilities.<p>3. It's hard to let go, at least for me, and I also found comfort in my Dad's digital leftovers...the idea that I was looking at representations of bits that were flipped because of him, even if trivial, stored all around the world. The best one was end of last year when that Breach Compilation password dump was released...I did a quick query for my Dad's email address and up popped his old password (since changed!) which was a very unique and meaningful word in our family. That made me smile.
>Our analysis suggests that a minimum of 1.4 billion users will pass away before 2100 if Facebook ceases to attract new users as of 2018.<p>Yep, every company’s customer/user base will die in 80 years if they don’t grow at all.
A co-worker of mine (lead architect) passed away a few months ago and his messages still show up frequently in Slack history searches and git blames. Feels weird that I could still DM the account.
The kids I know are, for now, skipping Facebook proper (for IG, etc.). If user inflow ends up less than the death rate, it's somewhat inevitable that the dead take over.
I had a Facebook friend who died, of cancer. For the next several months I continued to receive product recommendations and other "activity" notifications "from" her. At that point I decided Facebook was a dehumanizing platform and quit.
If the dead remain on social networks in perpetuity they'll make up a larger and larger % of the user base and actually have a significant statistical impact on the ratio of accounts vs. active users. It would take some sustained high birth rates or a dramatic decrease in death rates to reverse this.<p>In an extreme example, assuming every human ever born had a Facebook account there would be ~105B "memorial profiles" compared to ~7.5B "active users". Or, about 93% of accounts would belong to the dead.<p><a href="https://www.prb.org/howmanypeoplehaveeverlivedonearth/" rel="nofollow">https://www.prb.org/howmanypeoplehaveeverlivedonearth/</a>
It is really nice that Facebook provides the "memorial" feature. Some important sites like LinkedIn lack this.<p>I often get notifications asking me to "Congratulate ___ on completing 3 years at ___" when I know that the person has passed away.
My question about Facebook data is regarding historical research. If Facebook is around for 100-200 years, is there a point at which my data should no longer be protected and private? Should historians have access to Obama's private Facebook messages in 150 years just like we have Washington or Jefferson's private correspondence?
Because their login requirements are annoying: <a href="https://sci-hub.tw/10.1177/2053951719842540" rel="nofollow">https://sci-hub.tw/10.1177/2053951719842540</a>
There's some talk of regulation, and people who never knew individuals getting in on the act.<p>For those who so choose, I'd prefer to see options:
1. Person can set who gets to see their content after they pass, before they pass away. A part of their will.
2. People having access to the content of the person who has passed have ways to handle that as they wish. (Never see it, only see it when I ask etc.)<p>For those who choose not to prepare in advance, they might get the default, which they can change.
Part of the reason I deleted my last quasi-anonymous FB account was the feed page turning into an obituary section with more than a few old friends passing.
I thought this was going to be an article about online zombies, who are alive but act like trolls (is there a word for this?)<p>So for example, say I post a political, religious or otherwise controversial topic that says something about what used to be core values in the USA or something. Maybe I feel there's some fresh insight, or a way of connecting with people who don't agree with me so we can find common ground. 9 times out of 10, the same handful of people I expect to disagree with, respond and say the same thing I expected them to say.<p>In other words, I could have written the troll bot that would respond with what they say. It's a mathematical way of saying that their comments are precomputable, rather than coming from what we might consider free will.<p>Maybe I'm looking at this the wrong way? Maybe I'm the zombie, maybe we're all zombies, I dunno :-)
Huh. So can you script Friendface so that it sends out pre-scheduled posts? Dead me could really mess with people that way.<p>Now that I think of it, it would be an interesting hobby to build a virtual you that does things on Facebook.
Direct link to PDF:<p><a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2053951719842540" rel="nofollow">https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/205395171984254...</a>
I wrote a piece about this a while ago:<p><a href="https://jacquesmattheij.com/deadbook-the-long-term-facebook/" rel="nofollow">https://jacquesmattheij.com/deadbook-the-long-term-facebook/</a>
Randall Munroe of XKCD had an interesting write-up on this question a few years ago: <a href="https://what-if.xkcd.com/69/" rel="nofollow">https://what-if.xkcd.com/69/</a>
Whatever you think of social media, it has become for many a long past good sole, a digital cemetery.<p>What happens if such social platforms pass away, which can happen as the case with Google+.<p>Whilst we have charitable institutions and individuals who try and preserve this part of history in all it's yearly nuances, much goes and passed by (usenet archives) to the extent that sometimes such archives pass away.<p>Maybe now is the time to push a law that makes any social media platform solidify how they handle such digital gravestones, respecting family wishes. I appreciate many have on their own back organically have various forms of progress upon this. But nothing makes them accountable, no standard, law that preserves such gravestones of the digital age.
While historians love to peer into the minutiae of daily lives because, well, historians, how much does knowing Great-great Aunt Ethyll’s thoughts on Karl Marx actually affect us on a daily basis? How much will your predilection for the song stylings of Kim Kardashian affect future generations in a meaningful way?<p>While the aggregate opinions of the dead, while alive, might provide context for people yet to be born, let the individuals Rest In Peace, slowly to be forgotten. We don’t need to keep these profiles around for eternity (for one, that will get expensive). Beyond an interesting point at some family reunion, they won’t matter in any material way.
Well that's an odd thought. It seems inevitable though unless they suspend accounts that are inactive after a certain period of time. I think facebook is the one that needs to die though