No natural death on social media

A friend and former colleague of mine passed away a few weeks ago. After the shock, offered condolences to his son and as I was resting at home, a short re-run of our association flashed across my mind and I opened his Facebook page to have a look at old posts and photographs.

It was then, that this thought hit me. What will happen to this account now that my friend was no more? Will automatic reminders be sent by Facebook reminding all his friends about his birthday? OMG. What if some Facebook friend unaware of his demise ( all Facebook friends may not be in regular touch and some may not have met in person even once, right?) wished my departed friend on his birth anniversary? I could simply ‘ unfriend’ him on Facebook and be done with that, but then there would be a minor tinge of guilt as though I had killed our friendship.

Did a bit of research and found something interesting – Facebook has visualized such scenarios and had solutions ready. One, a close relative or friend can choose to delete the account totally by filling in a form, giving details of death of the account holder with a link to his obituary/ document establishing death and submitting to Facebook, who would delete the account.

Another option, which sounded better was Memorialisation. Here again, the same process as above has to be followed, with only the form being different. Once memorialised the account would remain with the word “ Remembering” prefixing the deceased account holder’s name. Friends and relatives can gather on the timeline to pay tributes, share memories, etc. but none can log in to the account or hack it. More important, birthday reminders will not be sent and the account will not be visible to advertisers. Will have a talk to my late friend’s son on this.

LinkedIn too has similar options for deletion of a deceased person’s account but memorialisation, obviously is not there, maybe to show that in the corporate or business world, memory is short and once you are gone, you are forgotten for sure unlike in case of family and friends. A new learning.