research-article

Perspectives on interaction with dead users' profiles on Facebook

Authors:

Daniele Trevisan,

Cristiano Maciel,

Vinícius Carvalho Pereira,

Roberto PereiraAuthors Info & Claims

IHC '21: Proceedings of the XX Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Article No.: 42, Pages 1 - 11

https://doi.org/10.1145/3472301.3484363

Published: 18 October 2021 Publication History

Abstract

With the Covid-19 pandemic, death has become an increasingly present and visible phenomenon on social networks. On Facebook, there is not a homogeneous treatment of death among deceased users' profiles: some remain active, whereas others are turned into memorials, but the criteria for this transformation are not clear. In both cases, privacy settings limit the interaction. These different possibilities give rise to different interactions and reactions among users. This paper addresses how dead users' profiles, multiplied due to the current pandemic, have been treated by Facebook's social-technical system, in comparison to possible posthumous interactions in the physical world. Our main objective is to understand to what extent Facebook's technical system supports or restricts social interactions concerning users' deaths. We carried out a qualitative exploratory analysis of data from 54 Facebook profiles belonging to people who passed away between June 2020 and March 2021. Among other results, we noticed: that Facebook fails to publicize the criteria for transforming active profiles into memorials and who are their heir contacts; that there is a difference in the amount and frequency of interactions between profiles transformed into memorials and those that remain active; and that profiles' privacy settings interfere with social interaction. This situation directly influences the ways other users relate or not with such profiles, which is an object of paramount importance in Human-Computer Interaction studies, especially when considering interaction as existence.

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Cited By

Galvão VMaciel CPereira RGasparini IViterbo JBicharra Garcia A(2021)Discussing human values in digital immortality: towards a value-oriented perspectiveJournal of the Brazilian Computer Society10.1186/s13173-021-00121-x27:1Online publication date: 26-Nov-2021
https://doi.org/10.1186/s13173-021-00121-x

Index Terms

Perspectives on interaction with dead users' profiles on Facebook
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Human computer interaction (HCI)
    1. Empirical studies in HCI

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cover image ACM Other conferences

IHC '21: Proceedings of the XX Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems

October 2021

523 pages

ISBN:9781450386173

DOI:10.1145/3472301

General Chairs:
Ingrid Teixeira Monteiro
Universidade Federal do Ceará (UFC)
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Kamila Rios da Hora Rodrigues
Universidade de São Paulo (USP)
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Ticianne de Gois Ribeiro Darin
Universidade Federal do Ceará (UFC)
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Program Chairs:
André Pimenta Freire
Universidade Federal de Lavras (UFLA)
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Marcelle Pereira Mota
Universidade Federal do Pará (UFPA)

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SBC: Brazilian Computer Society
SIGCHI: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction

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Published: 18 October 2021

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IHC '21: XX Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems

October 18 - 22, 2021

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Cited By

Galvão VMaciel CPereira RGasparini IViterbo JBicharra Garcia A(2021)Discussing human values in digital immortality: towards a value-oriented perspectiveJournal of the Brazilian Computer Society10.1186/s13173-021-00121-x27:1Online publication date: 26-Nov-2021
https://doi.org/10.1186/s13173-021-00121-x

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