Facebook ‘Recommends’ Friends After Death

By now most Facebook users have experienced finding out about the death of a friend or acquaintance via Facebook. Often times it is a weird sort of blessing — ten years ago most of us might not have known about the loss of old highschool friends we’d lost touch with until long after the fact. Now we have status updates and Facebook memorials. But as all things new social media, there are some strange, and sometimes upsetting side effects. This week’s Time notes one some of you may already have experienced.

The company decided to publicize the ["memorializing"] policy because of a backlash caused by a new version of the site’s homepage that was rolled out on Oct. 23, which includes automatically generated “suggestions” of people to “reconnect” with. Within days of the launch, Twitter users and bloggers from across the Web complained that some of these suggestions were for friends who had died. “Would that I could,” complained a user on Twitter before ending her tweet with the hash tag #MassiveFacebookFail.

Facebooks solution to this uncomfortable problem is to encourage family and friends to make sure to memorialize loved ones Facebook accounts after they have passed.

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