This morning, one of the guys in the office mentioned how offended he was by the fact that the profile of one of his friends who had died recently kept appearing in ‘Suggestions’ of Facebook. Being asked to ‘poke’ this person was pretty distasteful and upsetting, as I am sure you could imagine. I know he isn’t the first person to experience this and get angry at the lack of taste and sensitivity that it demonstrated, but unfortunately this is one of the results of the recent changes on Facebook.
However, although not many people know about it (why? According to the Sky News article above nearly 900,000 people experienced this), there is something you can do.
If you are friends on Facebook with someone who has died, you can contact Facebook and ask them to switch that profile to a memorialisation page. That way, none of the information is lost, but the privacy settings will be changed on it so that no-one else can friend the person, and they will no longer appear in suggestions, but the people who are already friends with them can still post messages on their wall in remembrance, and can still access the profile.
Max Kelly wrote about this on the official Facebook Blog and the form you need to fill in to inform Facebook that an individual is deceased is here. Yes the form does ask for a lot of information, but you can understand why Facebook does require so much evidence. They don’t want this facility being used maliciously to claim someone is deceased when they aren’t. I think it is a good start for a very difficult matter. The biggest mistake they have made is not telling people about it and allowing 900,000 people to feel the pain of being faced with a reconnection suggestion for someone who has died.
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Tags: deceased profiles, memorial pages
