It’s almost certainly not something that crossed Mark Zuckerberg’s mind when he launched Facebook from his Harvard dorm room in 2004, but now that there are over 3 billion Facebook users worldwide, there’s a tricky issue that social media companies are increasingly having to confront.
In a 2019 study, researchers from the University of Oxford Internet Institute calculated when the number of Facebook accounts belonging to deceased users would outnumber those belonging to the living. That date would be as early as 2070 if Facebook’s user base remained at its 2018 level. With continued user growth, it’s likely to happen within 100 years, based on projected mortality and population data.
Current estimates say that there are around 30 million Facebook profiles of people who have passed away. According to the researchers’ projections, if Facebook’s user base had stopped growing in 2018, there would be around 1.4 billion accounts belonging to deceased users by 2100. If it continues to grow at its current rate, that number could be as high as 4.9 billion by the end of this century.
Facebook already has a policy for turning profiles into memorialized accounts after the death of a user, which requires having a friend or family member contact the company and provide proper documentation. It’s possible to designate in advance what you’d like to happen to your account after your death. It can be deleted, or, if you designate a "legacy contact," that individual can be given access to look after the memorial page. There are already hundreds of thousands of these pages, though not all of the accounts of deceased users are memorialized. Many simply become inactive, which can be distressing when a deceased loved one's Facebook profile shows up as a "suggested friend" or a possible event attendee.
Instagram also memorializes accounts, although it does not allow anyone else to log in or change any settings. Taking a different approach, X (formerly known as Twitter) will deactivate the account of a deceased user at the request of their family members.
Friends from beyond the grave:
- Beyond the specific memorial policies or numbers of dead vs. living users, the Oxford study raises questions about our digital legacy. With so much of our lives focused on the Internet, most of us will leave behind a substantial amount of digital information.
- Study co-author David Watson has underlined the need for long-term solutions to manage this ever-growing amount of data, which is essentially a “vast archive of human behavior and culture,” specifically mentioning that “historians, archivists, archaeologists, and ethicists” should participate in the curation process.
- Discussing the intention of this research, study co-author Carl J. Öhman told Time magazine that “we wanted to bring in a more societal perspective and ask what the phenomenon of people dying on the internet means for us on a collective level.”
