Not something you want to find out on Facebook.
With the abundance of Facebook users worldwide, 1.79 billion active users currently, it seems that the website it trying to keep track of active and non-active accounts.
Sadly many people who once used Facebook have passed away, and so they are trying to monitor this and set those users pages to memorial ones.
It makes sense and pehaps it’s a nice way to keep your friends memory and share images and stories of them with other people who are grieving.
However, while it’s a nice idea, it might be better to only use it on people who are actually dead.
Some (living) Facebook users recently logged on only to be told that they had died.
https://twitter.com/alexia/status/797173539681898496
A banner appeared above the users profile which read:
”Remembering [name]
We hope people who love [name] will find comfort in the things others shared to remember her life.”
Facebook has recently gotten rid of some of it’s human staff and replaced them with algorithms which, following this report, hasn’t been working too well.
It seems that the algorithms are picking up on sympathetic and sad messages on a persons page and assumes they are dead.
For example, one woman who worked closely with Hillary Clinton, obviously had a lot of sad key words on her profile due to Hillary’s loss, and not because she died. But that didn’t stop them turning her account into a ‘memorialized account’
in other news, Facebook's algorithm thinks that i ****died**** based on the messages i'm getting #RIPme pic.twitter.com/IfoCDumNCi
— elaine filadelfo (@ElaineF) November 11, 2016
Facebook has been responding with the following statement and say it has now been fixed.
“For a brief period today, a message meant for memorialized profiles was mistakenly posted to other accounts. This was a terrible error that we have now fixed. We are very sorry that this happened and we worked as quickly as possible to fix it.”
Good news for all anyone who thought they might be dead for a second.
https://twitter.com/MikeWehner/status/797175484274589697
