Digital Grievance

The Age Of Grief Death Mystical Human Smoke – by Max Pixel (2016), from Max Pixel, used under CC 1.0

By Dominique Rivera

For anyone born in or after 2004, Facebook has been active for their entire lives. For some, there has never been an option not to have a digital identity. From the moment they were born, their parents were posting their baby pictures online. Trying to have control over your own digital identity on social media can be a challenge.

On the other end of the spectrum, when a person passes away, a digital identity on social media can become even more complex. Facebook, Twitter or Instagram accounts are often left to the loved ones of a deceased person to manage, or they just become inactive.

Before social media, estates typically dealt with only physical assets such as property and bank accounts when a person passes. With digital possessions such as an identity on social media websites, new frontiers have emerged. Does one preserve a loved one’s social media spaces globally to commemorate them or is it more appropriate to remove the deceased from social media completely? The company Jiwa tackles this dilemma by offering “services” to remove loved one’s digital identities [1]. However, many believe that there should be ways of dealing with a deceased person’s social media identity without having to pay fees.

Who should control your digital identity after you pass?

Given the world of social media today, should society dictate an acceptable strategy for managing your digital identity after you die? Facebook has delved into this issue with their introduction of a legacy contact option, introduced in 2015, in their settings/security section [2]. This feature allows participants to choose a friend, spouse, or family member to take over their accounts to post on their behalf after they pass away. In essence, Facebook is allowing users to designate a legacy contact to have complete autonomy over what is seen and shared on your Facebook account. Your designated legacy contact will have the authority to accept and respond to Facebook requests, update/add photographs and memorialize your page [3]. By having a legacy contact, Facebook is trying to create a bond between the deceased and the living [4].

With the time and effort that people now spend on creating a digital identity, these type of questions about who actually owns a digital identity is significant. Should the ongoing management of continuing care for a digital identity be included in a will? Perhaps creating a type of living legacy similar to a memorial site or a tree planted in honour of a loved one is an option, as these things also need continuous care from time to time. Should provisions be made for those who pass suddenly and have not left any instructions or legacy contact for the care of their digital identities? These are just the basic questions that should be considered when thinking about the maintenance of our social media and digital presence.

What does an online grievance page do for the mourners?

There are rituals for acknowledging the grief of the loved ones and the acquaintances of someone who was passed. People come to pay their respect, in many different ways according to cultures and traditions. But as with many aspects of social media, it can open the world to people who are oceans away and are not accessible for many reasons. Now people from the comfort of their homes can pay respect to someone they knew, or knew of, all through comments and/or pictures (Instagram); a tribute/link mentioning the person in a post (Twitter); or through wall posts (Facebook). This allows for a continual mourning and grievance [5]. There is a term for this: grief tourist or grief troll [6]. At times it seems that we are no longer able to grieve in private. Whether this is because we or other family members post about a loved ones passing; or perhaps because that loved one had shared their story of being sick before their passing. It is true that social media can bring awareness to certain illnesses, give comfort to the sick before they pass, share news on tragic losses as a result of accidents or violent crimes, and tell the story of how much a person is grieving the loss of loved one from their life. Social media does all this, but it does not afford the type of privacy that was once the norm for people to mourn in.

The various social media legacy pages can become tourist sites for friends, family, other loved ones and strangers to come visit and experience the remnants of the deceased’s digital identity. There are cases where social media has brought awareness to rare diseases, building communities within grieving pages. In 2015 in Toronto, a young girl named Carley Allison was diagnosed with a rare form of sarcoma when she was 17 [7]. During her fight with this disease, she kept her strength and shared her life on social media and through her YouTube channel [8]. Since Carley’s passing at age 19, her Instagram account has 23.6 thousand followers. Yet her family does not keep this account active. There are no more pictures and posts on behalf of Carley. Still, this account has taken on a life of it’s own becoming a place where people from all over the world go to view her brave story and to pay their respects [9].

Aside from legacies, social media will remind you of special events. The anniversary of a loved one passing; their birthday, a barge of reminders or flashback of posts from things that have happened ‘on that day’ [10]. For some this can make grieving almost unbearable because of the constant reminders of things that have happened previously on Facebook, Instagram or SnapChat. How does this affect our mental health? Under the constant glare of social media, how can one mourn the loss of loved ones their way, in their time? [11]

Studies have said that “in 2098, according to other statistics, the number of dead users on Facebook will outnumber the living” (Karppi, 2018, p.87). With this knowledge, it is imperative that Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, SnapChat, and other social media platforms start acting now on policies to protect the digital identity of their users, even after they have departed from this earth.