Facebook memorial page removed at mother, judge’s request

After a long and heartbreaking battle, a Brazilian judge has ordered the removal of Juliana Ribeiro Campos’ Facebook page. Campos passed away in May 2012, and her Facebook page had been changed to a memorial page after her death.

Campos’ mother, Dolores Pereira Coutinho, said that the messages, songs, and photos of her daughter that Campo’s friends were still able to post were too painful for her to see.

“This ‘wailing wall’ just makes me suffer too much,” Coutinho told the BBC, “On Christmas Eve many of her 200 friends posted pictures they had taken with her and recalled their memories. She was very charismatic, very popular. I cried for days.”

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After trying to delete the page on her own and campaigning for several months to have her daughter’s Facebook page removed, Coutinho says that she contacted the Sao Paolo office of the social network directly to no avail, so she filed the lawsuit to have it removed.

Judge Vania de Paula Arantes ruled on March 19 and again on April 10 that the page should be immediately shut down. This week, the judge said Facebook had 48 hours to take down the page, with imprisonment as the penalty for not doing so. Since the page was made available only to Campos’ friends after her death, Yahoo! Canada News was unable to verify that the page had in fact been removed.

Coutinho’s story puts an interesting spin on what Facebook started as a helpful service back in 2009. In a blog post explaining the service, Facebook employee Max Kelly explains that the profiles of loved ones who have passed away can be turned into ‘memorial’ pages when a friend or family member sends a request through this form. In the blog post, though, Kelly hits exactly the issue that Coutinho had with her daughter’s page, despite the good intentions of her friends:

“We understand how difficult it can be for people to be reminded of those who are no longer with them, which is why it's important when someone passes away that their friends or family contact Facebook to request that a profile be memorialized.”

The page itself was the most painful reminder of all for Coutinho, it seems, suggesting that there should be a way for certain users to block access and updates from the memorial page. Likewise, Coutinho’s forced removal of the memorial page may be infringing on the grieving process for many of Campos’ friends and other family members, who could have been using the page as an outlet for their grief.

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This issue comes just a few short months after The Verge identified another potential flaw in the Facebook memorial page process: users who weren’t really dead finding out that their page had been turned into a memorial, so they could no longer access their account. The application process for turning a page into a memorial does require proof of death, like a link to an obituary, but finding someone with the same name is enough to trick the approvers into incorrectly modifying someone’s profile.

It may be hard for some of us to think of a time before Facebook, but in reality, the technology is still relatively new. The etiquette and behaviours surrounding very human events like death in the realm of social media remains a minefield our use of new technologies continues to evolve.

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