We have probably all encountered situations where somone we know on Facebook passes away.

In most cases, the family of the deceased person will naturally assume important roles in administering end of life matters which we would all be pretty familiar with.

Death notices, funeral arrangements, probate matters etc are all difficult yet essential tasks that must be taken care of, regardless of the circumstances of the person’s death.

For a long time, despite changes in society, end of life matters remained pretty constant. And indeed, in many ways this remains so.

However, nowadays, so much of our personal information is online in various forms. It’s more than just information too. In essence, we have many strong bonds and relationships that are built and sustained electronically. Some relationships may exist exclusively online.

Therefore, a new yet very important consideration is how to deal with the deceased person’s Social Media profiles after they pass on.

What social media sites did the deceased person use ? Do we have access to them ? Did they leave passwords in their will documents ? Do we delete their page right away ? Do we change the name on the account and post something about the life of the person who just passed ? Do we leave the account active because it seems that there’s a piece of our loved one still with us ?

There are a myrid of considerations, and on Facebook, the process is called memorialising and works as follows:

Memorialising a Facebook Account

The main features of memorialized facebook accounts are:

• No one can log into a memorialized account and no new friends can be accepted
• Depending on the privacy settings of the deceased person’s account, friends can share memories on the memorialized Timeline
• Only friends can send private messages to the deceased person
• Friends will be able to view the deceased person’s Timeline and any content (ex: photos, posts) that was shared with them
• Memorialized Timelines don’t appear in People You May Know and other suggestions

Creating a Timeline (i.e. regular facebook accoun) in remembrance of an already deceased person is not allowed. Facebook encourage you to create a Page to do this.

Learn how to request the memorialization of a deceased person’s account.

To state the obvious, it’s not easy to deal with death on Facebook, especially as it’s such a relatively new activity for most people. It can be very hard to be familiar with interacting with a person via social media, and then return to see their social content remain unchanged after they have passed away.

Some people choose to keep loved ones social media profiles unchanged, which is understandable but ultimately (apart from being technically against facebook policy) is something that should not be done.

It is best to go throught the facebook memorialisation process as soon as possible and also, when we are planning any necessary will documents, to include passwords and other access information to all our digital/IT profiles so that when the times comes, our loved ones are not struggling dealing with our internet data on our behalf.

Not tasks that will fill us with joy but ones that are very important all the same.