Facebook Explains How Users’ Accounts Are Handled After They Die

In a post on Facebook’s Newsroom, Monika Bickert, director of global policy management, explained the process employed by the social media company for the treatment of profiles for users who have passed away, something that most social networking sites do not take into account.

Facebook has been “memorializing” accounts on its site for a while now; the process involves putting the word “remembering” next to the name of their profile, ensuring that nobody else can log in, and disabling some features, such as sending out birthday notifications to people on their friends list and not turning up in searches, in order to protect the loved ones of the deceased from undue grief. This is the default setting for the site.

Before 2015, this was the only option for the accounts of the deceased apart from deleting them completely. Contents of the profile, including potential treasured memories, could only be accessed through a lengthy legal process if deletion was chosen, leaving some in a dilemma about whether to keep the account up or take it down. Facebook then introduced what was known as “legacy contacts;” another person who the user elected before they died to take control over the account, such as changing the profile picture, accepting friend requests, or adding a pinned post to the profile. Legacy contacts could then choose to download an archive of photos, posts and profile information if they wanted to delete the account.

Facebook still has to be notified to about the death of one of their users — there is no automated system designed to shut down accounts of people it thinks are dead (although a bug that occurred back in 2016 did accidentally memorialize the accounts of some users).

This feature is not often publicised by Facebook, most likely due to the sensitive nature of the topic, but the “Hard Questions” series on Facebook Newsroom gave Bickert a licence to write about the topic, and about the problems that arose with it.

One issue that Facebook has is that in order to protect the privacy of people who knew the deceased but are still alive, they do not release any of the direct messages from the account to anyone else, even the legacy contacts. This decision was a tough one, as Bickert wrote:

For instance, if a father loses a teenaged son to suicide, the father might want to read the private messages of his son to understand what was happening in his son’s life. Had he been struggling in his university classes? Was he having problems with his boyfriend? As natural as it might seem to provide those messages to the father, we also have to consider that the people who exchanged messages with the son likely expected those messages would remain private. Although cases like this are heartbreaking, we generally can’t turn over private messages on Facebook without affecting other people’s privacy. In a private conversation between two people, we assume that both people intended the messages to remain private.

Some may argue that it would be simpler for Facebook to simply delete the accounts of dead users, rather than having to deal with this extra complication. In response, Bickert, who herself lost her husband, explained why they are memorialized:

Nearly a year after Phil died, I still catch my breath when I look through old photos on my phone. Some of those photos… move me to tears. But others, like the one of him standing proudly in our backyard with our daughters on Father’s Day, are starting to make me smile again. Those flashes of happiness, however brief, prove to me that reminders of our loved ones don’t have to be reminders of loss. And that, in turn, gives me hope that social media and the rest of our online world, rather than provoking pain, can ultimately ease our grief.