ABSTRACT
This study explores negative posts in Facebook pages dedicated to dead subjects. As with places for mourning in offline environments, memorial pages in Facebook appear to exude a sacred character as objects to both celebrate the life of the deceased and grieve their departure with others. Through a two-step content analysis of an initial sample of 600 pages containing the ‘R.I.P.’ acronym in their title, we found, however, a number of posts violating conventional expectations of respect for these mourning spaces. Negative posts in memorial pages take the form of flames (i.e., insults directed at the subject of the page, its administrator, or other visitors), venting (e.g., violent language against the victimizers of the subject of a memorial page), or ‘spam’ (i.e., advertisement and content not related to the subject and purpose of the page). Moreover, while results show that most memorial pages in Facebook are created and maintained by women (even thought the subject in the majority of those pages are young males who died an untimely death), they also reveal that women post the majority of negative posts in those pages as well. In other words, whereas women seem to perpetuate traditional offline roles in connection to mourning and grieving rituals, in the online world, they are also the first ones challenging the socially sanctioned sacral attributes of those practices in social networking sites.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributor
Rebecca Kern-Stone is an associate professor of communication, media studies, and advertising at Manhattan College. Her research interests focus on community and identity discourse and practice, gender studies, critical/cultural studies, and the intersections with television, new media, and advertising formats. Of particular interest is the ways in which media reflects larger cultural values and changes, and how media changes the ways community and identity construction are formed [email: [email protected]].
Notes
1. In the past, regardless of the privacy settings of the page, once Facebook learned of the death of a user, the memorialized page was only made accessible to friends and family members. This changed in 2014, when a new policy allowed for memorialized pages to be accessed more openly, if the original privacy settings allowed.
2. Facebook does not have a policy prohibiting spam content. They do directly prohibit illegal products, products targeted to minors that are illegal, ads that infringe upon copyrights, are sexually explicit or are violent in nature (www.facebook.com/policies/ads/). They also prohibit ads that are misleading and promote spyware or malware, among many others.
In addition, Facebook does not accept ads that violate their Community Standards guidelines, which are outlined on their website. These can be found at the following link: www.facebook.com/communitystandards.