Perspectives on interaction with dead users' profiles on Facebook

• Daniele Trevisan UFMT
• Cristiano Maciel UFMT
• Vinícius Carvalho Pereira UFMT
• Roberto Pereira UFPR

Abstract

With the Covid-19 pandemic, death has become an increasingly present and visible phenomenon on social networks. On Facebook, there is not a homogeneous treatment of death among deceased users' profiles: some remain active, whereas others are turned into memorials, but the criteria for this transformation are not clear. In both cases, privacy settings limit the interaction. These different possibilities give rise to different interactions and reactions among users. This paper addresses how dead users' profiles, multiplied due to the current pandemic, have been treated by Facebook's social-technical system, in comparison to possible posthumous interactions in the physical world. Our main objective is to understand to what extent Facebook's technical system supports or restricts social interactions concerning users' deaths. We carried out a qualitative exploratory analysis of data from 54 Facebook profiles belonging to people who passed away between June 2020 and March 2021. Among other results, we noticed: that Facebook fails to publicize the criteria for transforming active profiles into memorials and who are their heir contacts; that there is a difference in the amount and frequency of interactions between profiles transformed into memorials and those that remain active; and that profiles' privacy settings interfere with social interaction. This situation directly influences the ways other users relate or not with such profiles, which is an object of paramount importance in Human-Computer Interaction studies, especially when considering interaction as existence.

Keywords: Social interaction, existence, death, digital memorial, Facebook, COVID-19, pandemia, Digital Legacy Management Sytems