Facebook Dead Prank ‘KILLS’ Rusty Foster

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

Facebook Dead Prank ‘Kills’ Rusty Foster

The “Facebook Dead” prank is a bizarre new trend spreading across the social network, and many users, like Rusty Foster, find the simplicity of how easy it is to go about “killing” your friends on Facebook appalling.

Facebook’s new “Memorialization Request” form now makes it simple to convince Facebook users that anyone — dead or not — is deceased, at which point the site locks down the user’s profile and automatically creates a memorial page.

Rusty Foster discovered he was “Facebook dead” last week, when he noticed that he had been locked out of his account, which then had been turned into a “memorial page,” because someone had reported the Maine man as deceased to the social media site.

Foster tweeted Thursday, “Facebook thinks I’m dead. I’m tempted to just let it,” then “Did you know that you can report any of your Facebook friends dead & Facebook will lock them out of their account with no evidence needed?”

As one of Foster’s friends discovered, it doesn’t take much to convince Facebook that somebody is dead. By simply going to the “Memorialization Request” page and filling out a form, including a link to an obituary, anybody can take someone else off Facebook.

The obituary needs to have the same name (or at least a close name), but doesn’t need to match any other details on the profile. The obituary Foster’s friend used to prove Foster’s death was for a man who was born in 1924 and died in 2011 in a different state than the one Foster lists on Facebook as his home state.

Foster, 36, said he never got any notification his account was going to be locked, and only discovered it when he attempted to log in. He filled out a form to report the error, and received a response that began with “We are very sorry to hear about your loss.”

More than a full day later, Foster’s account still hadn’t been unlocked.

Buzzfeed.com, tipped off by Foster, posted an article in which one editor “killed” another editor, John Herrman, on Facebook.

Facebook has offered “memorialization” for accounts of deceased people for a while, but it seems that the bar has been lowered for how they verify the person in question is actually expired. Ideally, how it works is a friend or relative of a deceased person fills out a form from the Facebook Help section that gives the name, email, and account name of the deceased person. It also asks if you’re a friend, immediate family member, or other.

Lastly, it asks for proof that your friend is dead, but it will accept a link to an online obituary as sufficient proof. If your friend has a common enough name, just Google their name + “obituary” and you’ll probably find a match.

Once memorialized, your buddy will be locked out of his or her account. R.I.P.!

(WARNING: Don’t do this. It’s at the very least a pain in the ass for your friends.)

According to the article, about an hour after Herrman reported the error to Facebook, his profile was reactivated. About an hour after that, 27 hours after Foster first reported his erroneous death, he was “resurrected” by Facebook and allowed back into his account.

Update: Why is it so easy to fake a friend’s death? A Facebook spokeperson tells Buzzfeed, “we try to take all necessary precautions when processing user requests and provide an appeals process for any possible mistake we may make.” It doesn’t explain why there’s no email confirmation or why an obituary for someone 50 years older than the alleged deceased was accepted as valid proof of his death.

Foster does not know the total amount of time he was “Facebook dead.” He told ABC that nothing was different with his account when he logged back in, only that some of his friends had a little fun with his status.

“The only thing that happened was some of my friends posted little mock-eulogies for me, because word got around that I was locked out, due to a temporary case of death,” Foster wrote in an email with the subject line, “Rusty, the Facebook zombie.”

When pages are memorialized, they are removed from sidebars, timelines and friend suggestions and searches. This is likely to prevent people from seeing their friends who have died pop up on their newsfeed, and to prevent people from hacking into the accounts of dead people.

Foster said he understands the position Facebook is in when it comes to the death of one of its users, but believes there are better options for the social media site.

“There ought to be an email sent to the account’s email address informing it that the account has been reported dead and providing a link or something to dispute the report before any action is taken,” Foster wrote.

Foster said the most frustrating part was not being able to get into his account to “click the ‘I’m not dead’ button that should also be there.”

A deceased person’s digital legacy can be difficult to control, according to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal. Passwords are not readily available to surviving family members who want to preserve memories of their loved ones. Facebook’s memorialization page was created in 2009 to protect the user’s privacy, the Journal notes.

 
This has apparently been the same “memorialization” process in place when another user took to his personal blog to write about his experience of being “Facebook dead.” In his case, the obituary his friend used to have him declared dead wasn’t even close to his real name. Instead, the man who performed the funeral services had a similar name.

In a recent statement, Facebook said there is now a system in place in order to respect the privacy of the deceased.

“We have designed the memorialization process to be effective for grieving families and friends, while still providing precautions to protect against either erroneous or malicious efforts to memorialize the account of someone who is not deceased,” the statement reads. “We also provide an appeals process for the rare instances in which accounts are mistakenly reported or inadvertently memorialized.”

Update: About an hour after filling out the appeals process form, Rusty Foster’s account was reactivated. This is the email Facebook sent:

“It looks like your account was suspended by mistake. I’m so sorry for the inconvenience. You should now be able to log in. If you have any issues getting back into your account, please let me know.”