Nicholas Hune-Brown: How to die on Facebook

Until four years ago, Facebook’s official policy was to erase the profiles of dead users. After the massacre of 32 students at Virginia Tech, however, relatives of the victims found themselves returning again and again to Facebook to congregate and mourn. Today, Facebook will “memorialize” a loved one’s profile page, removing certain features and, upon request, locking the page to new friends, turning the profile into a kind of permanent digital gravestone. Friends can continue to post comments and tag photographs well after the person has died.

Before Facebook, you paid your respects to the dead by attending a funeral, shaking the hands of the deceased’s relatives and keeping what you truly thought about him or her bottled up. On Facebook, polite mourning is replaced by a free-for-all of uninhibited commentary. Worse, the comments are at once personal and public; never before has it been so easy to say something directly to another person, but within plain view of thousands.

When researchers from Oklahoma State University studied mourning on social networks, they were surprised by the number of comments left by people who had never met the deceased. As the story of Wadhwa and Nijjar unfolded, the moderator of the “Justice for Kiranjit Nijjar” page—who described herself as a 16-year-old who had never heard of Nijjar before her death—kept a running commentary, speaking of the deceased as if she were a close personal friend. “Please treat others the way you want to be treated,” she wrote in response to comments critical of Wadhwa. Then, displaying a powerful psychic connection to the girl she’d never met, she added, “That is what Kiran would say if she were alive today.”

In a 2010 paper published in the Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society, academics analyzed the social media profiles of the dead, dividing the types of messages into various groups. Unsurprisingly, most messages were short notes that said things like “RIP” or “I miss you”—the digital equivalent of leaving flowers at a grave or wearing a Victorian black arm band, a token gesture that symbolically and publicly marks you as someone in mourning. Other messages were what the researchers described as attempts to eulogize the deceased. People posted anecdotes from their friend’s life, casting themselves in central roles—an attempt to claim a kind of ownership over the dead person’s experiences. Or they emphasized certain values the friend had in the same way that, after the death of Steve Jobs, users flooded Facebook and Twitter with updates summing up the man’s life in the hollow words of a marketing campaign: “Think different.”

These impulses aren’t new; part of grieving is making sense of a life, creating a coherent biography of the deceased that you can fit into your own story. In the past, however, the public act of telling someone’s life story was left to eulogists and newspaper obituary writers. In the same way that the Internet has democratized opinion journalism and encyclopedia authorship, it has opened obituary writing up to the masses. And unlike traditional mourning rites such as funerals and memorial services, Facebook memorials offer no position of privilege to family members or close friends. Everyone can chime in.

When Akash Wadhwa’s friends began his Facebook memorial page, they were attempting to tell one side of his story. “Akash didn’t have a good start in life and it’s not his fault that no one gave him the help he desperately needed,” someone wrote. When commenters disagreed with this kind of interpretation, the page soon became a battleground, with comment wars raging, bolstered by the number of “likes” each argument received, until the multitude of voices claiming authority on the subject had built to an overwhelming roar.

One commenter tried to quell the criticism. “Being dead, Akash himself is incapable of having an opinion of this memorial page,” he wrote. “This page is more for the people who were upset by his death to remember him.” The page wasn’t about celebrating a murderer. It wasn’t even really for Wadhwa, just as a eulogy is not actually for the dead person, but for the people left behind.

Perhaps that’s the strangest thing about the way we deal with death online. Facebook is the place where, according to the company, we “tell our story.” It’s a kind of autobiography written in real time, where we get to select what we show the world. When we die on Facebook, we lose control of that narrative, and those who survive us have the final word.

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