In November 2019 there was a revolt of users on Twitter, now X. It was not the Russian Revolution or the Boston Tea Party, but it was an outbreak of digital anger of unusual intensity, especially if we take into account what triggered it.
The social network that Jack Dorsey was shepherding at the time had just announced a decision that was, in principle, trivial: it was going to deactivate a series of accounts of deceased users to “make room” for new additions in territories that were then expanding, such as the European Union. The aim was to consolidate as soon as possible a community of more than 300 million “living and active” users. Twitter, as those in charge said at the time, intended to be “an agora” in permanent boiling, not an elephant graveyard. I needed more muscle and less fat.
Grassroots Twitter users reacted to the plan with almost unanimous indignation. That seemed like abuse to them. Twitter was arrogating to itself the right to ruthlessly “expropriate” or even “destroy” “private” spaces of unquestionable emotional value. What about the photos, reflections and memories shared over the years by family and friends who are no longer with us? What to do with the contributions of illustrious tweeters such as the actor Cameron Boyce, the singer Marie Fredrikkson or the fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, who had died a few months earlier? Wasn’t the merciless destruction of their tweets, of their digital trail, equivalent, in a certain way, to the desecration of their graves?
One user took the sinister analogy a step further: Twitter’s bulldozers were about to loot mass graves. Jack Dorsey, with his obsession with economizing a virtual space that is not even a scarce commodity, had decided to disturb the sleep of the dead. The enactment of a digital (and universal) historical memory law was nearly demanded. Drew Olanoff, editor of the TedCrunch tech newsletter, He took the discussion to strictly personal territory by regretting that a “legitimate” but poorly thought-out and even less empathetic business decision was going to deprive him of the “consolation” of occasionally reviewing the string of messages that his father had left before he died. Oblivion, Olanoff concluded, is a second death.
Digital Mausoleums
The most surprising thing about the case, as the entrepreneur magazine points out Maddyness, is that the percentage of network users who wanted their accounts to remain active after they died was very low at that time, just 7%, according to a YouGov survey. People, it seemed, were less concerned with preserving their own digital heritage than with respecting that of others. You bury me wherever, without pomp or ceremony, but leave the memory of my loved ones in peace.
This unexpected consumer insurrection forced Twitter to back down. They had rushed. They had not taken into account that this was a “sensitive” issue, one that cannot be resolved lightly, and they promised not to make “drastic” decisions until they found an appropriate way to “honor and respect” the legacy of deceased users.
Facebook had already taken the lead in that regard. Since 2018, it has offered the possibility for ordinary accounts to become “commemorative” after the death of their holders. It is enough for a direct family member to request it, providing, in the process, a death certificate. “Memorialized” accounts (memorialised) They can be “frozen” completely, so that they remain for an indefinite period just as their owner left them, but with the words “In memory of…” clearly visible next to the username. They can also remain under the control of the requesting family member, with an activity in principle limited to “remembering and celebrating the life” of the deceased person.
In both cases, it is about converting them into modest mausoleums, “spaces of memory,” “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 2021 in a traffic accident: “I cannot visit her grave very often, which is in a cemetery in Lima. thousands of kilometers away, but sharing that meeting space with the rest of the people who loved her. She remains very active and I find it useful in managing grief and feeling connected to her.”
There is no one living here
Twitter took its time to implement an option similar to that of Facebook, although in December 2019 it announced that it was preparing to do so imminently. As the technology expert and editor of Forbes Barry Collins, The issue was not a priority for them. The company was already embarking on the complex internal restructuring process that would conclude with its sale to Elon Musk. He needed to rationalize his inventory of accounts as soon as possible, canceling the inactive ones, but not at the cost of earning the animosity of his parish. Nor was he enthusiastic about the prospect of offering “posthumous services” of very dubious profitability when the most urgent thing was to revitalize a virtual environment that was beginning to show signs of languishing. So he chose to postpone the decision.
The controversy remained latent until Musk, in the spring of this year, launched the massive account purge process known as “the Twitter purges.” The operation consisted of detecting and archiving (not deleting) up to 1.5 billion user profiles that had remained inactive for years, without taking into account, in principle, whether they were deceased or “dormant” users.
The fact that the content of these accounts remained archived and, therefore, could be reactivated at convenience, has opened the possibility, as the company announced on May 19, that relatives of deceased users reactivate them as commemorative spaces, following a procedure similar to that provided by Facebook. But this continues to be, today, a poorly systematized and barely used option. Nothing to do, in any case, with the high density of digital mausoleums of this type that both Facebook and Instagram present right now, the pair of networks most committed to posthumous memory. Perhaps this sensitivity explains that, already in 2019, the dead were about to outnumber the living among Facebook accounts, a digital environment that ages rapidly.
Make a will
In the opinion of Naaman Zhou, newspaper technology expert Guardian, it is beginning to become urgent for all those who have an “intense” life on networks to consider, once and for all, making a “digital will.” In other words, if you are worried about “who (and how) will be in charge of preserving, controlling or deleting your accounts when you die”, why not be the one to decide for yourself, as a user with rights, while you are alive?
A digital will is a plan to “prevent identity theft, preserve documents or memories that you do not want to be lost, or prevent your loved ones from suffering a painful and unwanted bombardment of alerts related to you.” From her conversations with experts such as the teacher at the Monash University Emily van der Nagel, Zhou concludes that a coherent strategy involves, first of all, “devirtualizing” as much as possible everything that you consider valuable. That is, download and preserve on a different medium the documents or images that you have uploaded to your social networks using the download tools offered by most platforms, starting with Twitter, Facebook or YouTube.
Then you must take advantage, whenever you are allowed (Facebook, for example, does this), to the option of designating a digital heir to whom it would be advisable for you to also provide your access codes. That trusted person will act on your behalf when you are not there and will ensure that your wishes are respected in matters as basic as whether your account is deleted immediately or, on the contrary, is maintained and transformed into a space for temporary or permanent tribute. . Van der Nagel recommends that, as with other wills, the digital will be recorded in a secret document with the expectation that its contents will be made known to the appropriate party after death. If in doubt, you can arrange for that document to be safeguarded by a manager. Bequeath your identities on-line It can be simple, or as complex as doing it with your home or the money in your checking account.
Whose are 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 this depends largely on the conditions of use of each specific platform. Generally, the company that owns the platform reserves, at a minimum, a discretionary right of use. This explains why Instagram user photos are sometimes used as advertising material in the network’s own campaigns without the need to obtain prior authorization from their authors. The existence of conditions of use that the user abides by to access the service does not, of course, prevent certain abusive practices from giving rise to claims or lawsuits.
Another detail of increasing importance has to do, as noted in Bulletin DigWatch, with the use of artificial intelligence in the management of digital legacies. The issue is complex, but has broad ethical and technological implications. For example, the AI generation of hybrid or synthetic images, as well as deep fakes, It can create posthumous reputational damage to a deceased person by attributing statements or actions that he or she never performed.
Most States are making serious efforts to introduce regulations in that broad gray area that goes from flagrant crime 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, complemented by subsequent legislation (the last modification was registered in May 2023) and pending a general update in the framework. of the European Union.
DigWatch considers that this attempt to consolidate a legal framework is well oriented, but is insufficient in light of the technological developments that are occurring in areas related to social networks. In other words, in this era of acceleration of disruptive change that modifies, again and again, the rules of the game, protecting our digital rights has become a major challenge.
It is not surprising that a nascent industry of digital legacy managers is beginning to flourish. People who help you conceive them, write them and get them executed just the way you want. It may seem like science fiction, but estimates of its current volume and medium-term growth expectations are already being published. There is also an international institution, the Digital Legacy Association, which is responsible for dealing with these types of issues, which are increasingly more intricate.
After all, if we spend about one ninth of our time to boldly cultivate our presence on-linein a systematic effort much more demanding (and rewarding?) than what would be involved in caring for a colony of pets or a garden, what is so strange that we are increasingly concerned about what will become of our social media profiles when we have died? ?
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