When someone close to you or even just someone you know casually passes away, one of the places where we grieve their loss is on social media. No matter how you feel about that, it’s already a given. Facebook introduced memorialized accounts to help convert accounts of departed users into a place where their loved ones can pay tribute to them and share their fond memories. Now they’re bringing improvements to how these accounts are managed based also on feedback from users of different religions and cultural backgrounds and experts and academicians as well.
While you could already post your tribute to your loved one on the memorialized account, now they have made a separate tributes section which is a separate tab that can be easily found on the profile. This way, the original timeline can still be maintained while friends and family members can contribute to the digital memorial for their departed loved one. The tributes made on Facebook are seen as one way for people to grieve and remember their friend, colleague, classmate, family member.
Facebook allows users to choose a legacy contact who can take over their account in case they pass away. Previously, they could only change the profile photo and cover photo and pin a post to the top of the profile. Now that contact will now be able to moderate the posts that will be shared in the tributes section. They will be able to change tagging settings, remove the tags, edit who can post and who can see the posts, etc. Parents of users under 18 can also now request to be their child’s legacy contact.
One feedback given to Facebook is that sometimes the people closest to the person who passed aren’t yet ready to take that step of memorializing their loved one. So now only friends and family members can request to have the account memorialized. And if they haven’t yet done so, AI will help in making sure the account doesn’t show up in “distressing” ways , like a birthday reminder or being invited to events, etc.
Facebook says they will continue to listen to feedback when it comes to these memorialized accounts so that the social network “remains a place where the memory and spirit of our loved ones can be celebrated and live on.”
SOURCE: Facebook
