Dead Users’ Profiles on Facebook: Limited Interaction Beyond Human Existence

Abstract

Death has become increasingly visible on social networks, especially after COVID-19, and Facebook addresses that with double standards: while some profiles remain active, others turn into memorials. This article investigates how Facebook’s system deals with dead users’ profiles either to support or restrict interactions concerning users’ deaths. Our qualitative analysis of data from 54 public profiles of people who died between June 2020 and March 2021 showed that (i) Facebook fails to communicate the criteria for transforming profiles into memorials; (ii) no information about their contacts of deceased users’ profiles is given; (iii) the frequency of interaction with memorials and with active profiles is different; (iv) profiles’ privacy settings shape interaction. Our results exemplify how a sociotechnical system influences people’s interactions with dead users’ profiles. We herein highlight implications for interaction design and evaluation, besides the need to consider interaction as existence, which raises big challenges to the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) community.

Challenges and opportunities of Facebook during bereavement: experiences from Taung in South Africa

“…Ohman and Watson (2019) estimated that Facebook profiles belonging to the deceased will accumulate to hundreds of millions of dead users in the next few decades and that the profiles of the deceased might exceed the living ones before the end of the century. According to Trevisan et al (2023), this accumulation of accounts of deceased people results from the fact that Facebook struggles to distinguish between profiles of the living and the deceased; the latter continues to be treated as if they are still alive. Death on social media is a phenomenon that has become increasingly common in recent years.…”