Can Twitter and Facebook Deal With Their Dead?

Barence writes "One and a half million Facebook users die each year. Twitter faces a similar mortality rate. Yet the social networks have been relatively slow to deal with the uncomfortable business of death. Only this week has Twitter finally unveiled a policy for handling the accounts of dead members. Yet the process for closing the accounts of deceased relatives is complicated, while reminders to follow the accounts of people who have long since passed away continue to arrive, adding to the pain of grieving friends and relatives."

Comments

I don't know about Twitter, but..

[drunkennewfiemidget]

A very good friend of mine was murdered in October of 2008 (for those of you in Toronto/Ontario/Canada, Bailey Zaveda, the girl that was gunned down while outside of a bar having a cigarette) by someone she didn't know and had no involvement with.

Anyway, her facebook account still exists, and I don't see the problem with that. Everyone knows what happened to her, and her profile served as part of the grieving process for many people. To this day, they post their latest happenings in their lives on her wall, say happy birthday to her, etc.

I mean, if the interest here is to get the facebook.com/username or twitter userid back, then revoke those after say, 1 year of inactivity, but I don't see the harm in leaving the account there for people to reminisce, grieve, or whatever.

Re:I don't know about Twitter, but..

[snookerhog]

A friend of mine had a mate of his die a few years back. the guy was cremated and they have a facebook page for his ashes that tells of his postmortem travels to rock concerts and the like. He was not even on facebook until after he was dead. (insert over-my-dead-body-joke here)

If only my friends and relatives can be as creative with the remains of my corpse...

Re:I don't know about Twitter, but..

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Mass casualties are stranger. I have a lot of friends in Haiti. With facebook its all a little creepy. You see my friends interaction right before the earthquake through the wall posts. Its like a digital pompeii. Its just really sad to look at all of the promise, all of the hope ... gone.

This might be a little uncomfortable...

[dominion]

I was at the Federated Social Web Summit this July, and over drinks, I was discussing this issue with other open source social networking developers. I mentioned that I've had a few friends pass who still have a presence on the social web (livejournal, facebook, myspace), and I really appreciate being able to go back and remember them that way. I also mentioned that their parents have access to their accounts, so people would get especially unnerved when that "online now" icon would show up or when they would pop up in a chat list, because their parents were checking or closing out their account.

I had a little too much to think, so I posited the idea of a system which learns, based on what you've posted, how to post like you after you're gone. Not a full representation, but a way to continue to create an impression of you. Less like Sonny from I, Robot, and more like Mal from Inception. A shadow of a person, based on what people remember. Or, more specifically, what the system remembers. Since conceivably, generations born in 2000 and up will live their whole lives on the social web, systems will have a lot of information with which to recreate a person's personality. When I suggested this, someone asked, "Why would I have to wait until I died to use this?"

I won't be coding this into Appleseed, because for now, it violates the "Don't Be Creepy" rule that sometimes people break when building prediction software. But there's no reason it can't be done, which means at some point, someone will do it.

Michael Chisari
Appleseed - http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/

Re:Perhaps a "key escrow" feature?

[Spectre]

It wouldn't be too easily abused if it did one or more of the following:

• Required at least two people who had been given "declare dead" rights to declare the death
• Sent an e-mail to the account holder's registered e-mail address with a link to an "I'm not dead" page, no response in, say, 72 hours and the account goes "dead" (although it should still have the "dead" status be revocable after the 72 hours have expired)

I don't really know why this would be a problem for Twitter, though. It isn't like the dead person is going to be texting Twitter, so there shouldn't be any updates being posted?

Re:Not just social networks

[psbrogna]

Perhaps they're already gone and the role is being fulfilled à la The Dread Pirate Roberts. This might explain some of the step-changes in editing quality over the last decade.