Death and the Internet

A recent extension to the cultural relationship with death is the increasing number of people who die having created a large amount of digital content, such as social media profiles, that will remain after death. This may result in concern and confusion, because of automated features of dormant accounts (e.g. birthday reminders), uncertainty of the deceased's preferences that profiles be deleted or left as a memorial, and whether information that may violate the deceased's privacy (such as email or browser history) should be made accessible to family.

Issues with how this information is sensitively dealt with are further complicated as it may belong to the service provider (not the deceased) and many do not have clear policies on what happens to the accounts of deceased users. While some sites, including Facebook and X (formerly Twitter), have policies related to death, others remain dormant until deleted due to inactivity or transferred to family or friends. The FADA (Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act) was set in place to make it possible to transfer digital possessions legally.[1]

More broadly, the heavy increase in social media use is affecting cultural practices surrounding death. "Virtual funerals" and other forms of previously physical memorabilia are being introduced into the digital world, complete with public details of a person's life and death.[2][3][4]

  1. ^ NextAdvisor.com (2017-02-11). "Your Digital Inheritance: What Happens to Your Social Media Accounts When You Die?". Huffington Post. Retrieved 2019-02-25.
  2. ^ Bisceglio, Paul (2013-08-20). "How Social Media Is Changing The Way We Approach Death". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2019-03-25.
  3. ^ Dilmac, Julie (2018). "The New Forms of Mourning: Loss and Exhibition of the Death on the Internet". Journal of Death and Dying. 77 (3): 280–295. doi:10.1177/0030222816633240. PMID 29940829. S2CID 49409504.
  4. ^ "We Live On the Internet. We Die Alone". Time. Retrieved 2019-03-25.