In November 2019, there was a user revolt on Twitter, which now triggered it.
The social network that Jack Dorsey was running at the time had just announced what was essentially a trivial decision: it wanted to deactivate a number of accounts belonging to deceased users in order to “make room” for new additions in territories that were expanding at the time, such as the European Union. The goal was to consolidate a community of more than 300 million “live and active” users as quickly as possible. As those responsible at the time said, Twitter should be an “agora” in constant boiling and not an elephant graveyard. I needed more muscle and less fat.
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Grassroots Twitter users responded to the plan with almost unanimous outrage. This seemed like abuse to them. Twitter assumed the right to ruthlessly “expropriate” or even “destroy” “private” spaces of undeniable emotional value. What about the photos, reflections and memories that family and friends who are no longer with us have shared over the years? What should be done with the contributions of illustrious Twitterers such as the actor Cameron Boyce, the singer Marie Fredrikkson or the fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, who died a few months earlier? Wasn’t the merciless destruction of their tweets, their digital trail, in a way tantamount to desecrating their graves?
One user took the eerie analogy one step further: Twitter’s bulldozers were looting mass graves. Jack Dorsey, with his obsession to save a virtual space that is not even a scarce commodity, had decided to disturb the sleep of the dead. The adoption of a digital (and universal) historical memory law was almost called for. Drew Olanoff, editor of the technology newsletter TedCrunch, shifted the discussion to purely personal territory by lamenting that a “legitimate” but ill-conceived and even less empathetic business decision would deprive him of the “convenience” of reading the series From Time to time messages left by his father before his death. Oblivion, says Olanoff, is a second death.
Digital mausoleums
The most surprising thing about the case, as the entrepreneurial magazine Maddyness points out, is that the percentage of network users who wanted their accounts to remain active after their death was very low at the time, only 7%, according to a YouGov survey. . People seemed less concerned with preserving their own digital heritage and more concerned with respecting the heritage of others. You bury me wherever, without pomp or ceremony, but leave the memory of my loved ones in peace.
This unexpected consumer uprising forced Twitter to back down. They had rushed. They had not taken into account that it was a “sensitive” issue that cannot be solved lightly, and they promised not to make any “drastic” decisions until they found an appropriate way to “honor” the legacy of deceased users and to respect”.
Facebook had already taken the lead in this regard. Since 2018, it has been possible for ordinary accounts to become “memorial accounts” upon the death of their holders. It is sufficient for a direct relative to apply for this and provide a death certificate. “Memorial Accounts” can be completely “frozen,” leaving them indefinitely exactly as their owner left them, but with the words “In Memory of…” prominently displayed next to the username. They may also remain under the control of the applicant family member, with their activity limited in principle to “remembrance and celebration of the life” of the deceased person.
In both cases, the aim is to transform them into modest mausoleums, “memory rooms”, “nostalgic corners” with which Facebook offers its community the option of a (digital) life beyond death. Amalia Yepes, a 43-year-old Peruvian administrator living in Barcelona, manages the page in memory of her younger sister Blanca, who died in a traffic accident in 2021: “I can’t visit her grave very often, it’s in a cemetery in Lima. Thousands of miles away, but she shared this meeting place with the other people who loved her. She remains very active and I find it helpful to deal with the grief and feel connected to her.”
Nobody lives here
Twitter took its time implementing a similar option to Facebook, but announced in December 2019 that it was preparing to do so immediately. As technology expert and Forbes editor Barry Collins explained, the issue wasn’t a priority for them. The company had already initiated the complex internal restructuring process that would be completed with the sale to Elon Musk. He needed to rationalize his account balance and cancel the inactive accounts as quickly as possible, but not at the cost of incurring hostility from his community. Nor was he enthusiastic about the prospect of offering “posthumous services” of very dubious profitability when the most urgent need was to revitalize a virtual environment that was beginning to show signs of decline. Therefore, he decided to postpone the decision.
The controversy remained latent until Musk launched the massive account purge process known as the “Twitter purges” this spring. The operation consisted of discovering and archiving (not deleting) up to 1.5 billion user profiles that had remained inactive for years, fundamentally ignoring whether they were deceased or “dormant” users.
The fact that the content of these accounts remained archived and therefore could be reactivated at any time opens up the possibility, as the company announced on May 19, of relatives of deceased users reactivating them as memorial sites following a similar process provided by Facebook. However, even today this remains a poorly systematized and rarely used option. In any case, this has nothing to do with the high density of digital mausoleums of this kind that both Facebook and Instagram currently present, the two networks most committed to posthumous memory. Perhaps this sensitivity explains why, in 2019, the number of dead already exceeded the number of living among Facebook accounts, a digital environment that is rapidly aging.
Make a will
According to Naaman Zhou, technology expert at The Guardian newspaper, it is becoming increasingly important for those who live a “intensive” life on networks to think about creating a “digital will” once and for all. In other words, if you are concerned about “who (and how) will be responsible for maintaining, controlling, or deleting your accounts after your death,” then why not decide for yourself as a user with rights while you are on Life?
A digital will is a plan to “prevent identity theft, preserve documents or memories you don’t want to lose, or prevent your loved ones from suffering a painful and unwanted barrage of alerts concerning you.” From his conversations with experts like Emily van der Nagel, a professor at Monash University, Zhou concludes that a coherent strategy is first to “devirtualize” everything you think is valuable as much as possible. This means that you can download the documents or images that you have uploaded to your social networks and save them to another medium using the download tools of most platforms, starting from Twitter, Facebook or YouTube.
Then, whenever you are allowed to do so (Facebook does this, for example), you must use the opportunity to name a digital heir, to whom you should also share your access codes. This trusted person will act on your behalf when you are away and ensure that your wishes are respected in basic matters such as whether your account is deleted immediately or, on the contrary, retained and placed in a space for temporary or permanent honors is converted. . Van der Nagel recommends that the digital will be recorded in a secret document, as with other wills, with the expectation that its contents will be disclosed to the responsible party after the death. If in doubt, you can arrange for a superior to secure the document. Inheriting your online identities can be as simple or as complex as inheriting your home or the money in your checking account.
Who owns my tweets?
An important aspect is the ownership of the content uploaded to the networks. That is, who is the legal owner of my photos, my data or my messages. The answer is that it largely depends on the terms of service of each platform. In general, the company that owns the platform reserves at least a discretionary right of use. This explains why Instagram users’ photos are sometimes used as promotional material in the network’s own campaigns, without the need to obtain prior permission from the creators. Of course, the existence of conditions of use that the user adheres to when accessing the service does not preclude certain abusive practices from giving rise to claims or lawsuits.
Another detail of increasing importance, as mentioned in the DigWatch newsletter, concerns the use of artificial intelligence in the management of digital legacies. The issue is complex but has far-reaching ethical and technological implications. For example, AI generation of hybrid or synthetic images as well as deep fakes can cause posthumous reputational damage to a deceased person by attributing statements or actions that they never performed.
Most states are making serious efforts to regulate this vast gray area, which ranges from blatant criminality to simple irresponsible or unscrupulous use. In Spain, these issues are regulated by the Organic Law on the Protection of Personal Data and Guarantee of Digital Rights of December 2018, supplemented by subsequent laws (the last amendment was registered in May 2023) and pending a general update of the framework by the European Union.
DigWatch considers that this attempt to consolidate a legal framework is well-directed, but insufficient given technological developments in the areas of social networks. In other words, in this time of accelerating disruptive change that continues to change the rules of the game, protecting our digital rights has become a major challenge.
Not surprisingly, an emerging industry of digital legacy managers is beginning to flourish. People who will help you design it, write it, and make it the way you want. It may seem like science fiction, but estimates of current volume and medium-term growth expectations are already being published. There is also an international body, the Digital Legacy Association, responsible for addressing these types of increasingly complex issues.
After all, if we spend about a ninth of our time diligently cultivating our online presence, in a systematic effort that is far more demanding (and rewarding?) than tending a pet colony or a garden, then what’s so strange that we make us increasingly worried? about what happens to our social media profiles when we die?
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