Facebook revamps rules, expands features for life after death on social media

What happens when the day comes for your social media profile to live on without you?

Facebook on Tuesday introduced new rules and features for memorialized accounts, which are profiles of users who have died, according to a blog post on the site.

“I had very close friends, particularly one, who had lost people and told me how important Facebook was to preserving their memories,” said Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s operations chief, Wired reported.

“My friend Kim had lost her brother, he died by suicide, and she and her mother were not up to having a memorial service, so Facebook became that memorialization place for them,” Sandberg said, according to the publication.

The new policies give legacy contacts — people designated to handle memorialized accounts — more control over the profiles, according to the blog post.

In the past, Facebook’s algorithm converted profiles to memorialized accounts on its own, sometimes before friends and family were notified or ready, the blog post says.

“We’ve heard from people that memorializing a profile can feel like a big step that not everyone is immediately ready to take,” the post reads. “That’s why it’s so important that those closest to the deceased person can decide when to take that step. Now we are only allowing friends and family members to request to have an account memorialized.”

Facebook also has changed its algorithm to try to avoid inappropriate or painful content, such as auto-generated birthday or event reminders, The Verge reported.

The social media site has added a separate tributes section to memorialized pages so people can share memories and mark milestones without interfering with the late user’s posting history, according to the blog. Legacy contacts will be able to manage the section.

This story was originally published April 9, 2019 at 12:53 PM with the headline "Facebook revamps rules, expands features for life after death on social media."