Skip to main content

Facebook gives grieving father a ‘Look Back’ video for his dead son

“All we want to do is see his movie. I know it’s a shot in the dark but I don’t care,” said a father mourning the death of his son, who asked Facebook to make a “Look Back” video to bring him some comfort. John Berlin, whose son died in 2012, has been unable to access his son’s account since his death. After seeing Facebook friends share the “Look Back” videos Facebook made for each user on its tenth anniversary, Berlin uploaded a video of himself to YouTube directly pleading with Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook team to let him see his son’s video. 

Berlin’s heartstring-yanking plea went viral, and Facebook contacted Berlin and told him the company is creating a memorial video for his deceased son. 

Recommended Videos

The incident prompted Facebook to consider how to better memorialize its users who have died. “This experience reinforced to us that there’s more Facebook can do to help people celebrate and commemorate the lives of people they have lost,” a Facebook spokeswoman told the BBC in an email.

An estimated 2.89 million Facebook accounts belonged to dead people in 2012, according to Nathan Lustig, who founded a company called Entrustet to help manage online accounts after death. That number has surely grown. Facebook’s current policy for its dead users is simple: turn their profile into a memorial page. Family members can ask to have the account deactivated if they don’t want a memorial page. But Facebook takes a passive role in its users’ deaths; they don’t look up obituaries to figure out if users have passed away, so family and friends have to alert Facebook to change the profile from an active page to a memorial page. Facebook also lets family and friends do the memorializing, and of course, you can’t expect the company to handpick a collage for each dead user. But the “Look Back” videos show the company can use an algorithm to pull up a user’s greatest hits, so it would be a welcome move if Facebook provided a similar video upon request for the friends of a recently deceased user. 

Here is Berlin’s original YouTube request: 

Kate Knibbs
Former Contributor
Kate Knibbs is a writer from Chicago. She is very happy that her borderline-unhealthy Internet habits are rewarded with a…
Topics
Bluesky finally adds a feature many had been waiting for
A blue sky with clouds.

Bluesky has been making a lot of progress in recent months by simplifying the process to sign up while at the same time rolling out a steady stream of new features.

As part of those continuing efforts, the social media app has just announced that users can now send direct messages (DMs).

Read more
Reddit just achieved something for the first time in its 20-year history
The Reddit logo.

Reddit’s on a roll. The social media platform has just turned a profit for the first time in its 20-year history, and now boasts a record 97.2 million daily active users, marking a year-over-year increase of 47%. A few times during the quarter, the figure topped 100 million, which Reddit CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman said in a letter to shareholders had been a “long-standing milestone” for the site.

The company, which went public in March, announced the news in its third-quarter earnings results on Tuesday.

Read more
Worried about the TikTok ban? This is how it might look on your phone
TikTok splash screen on an Android phone.

The US Supreme Court has decided to uphold a law that would see TikTok banned in the country on January 19. Now, the platform has issued an official statement, confirming that it will indeed shut down unless it gets some emergency relief from the outgoing president.

“Unless the Biden Administration immediately provides a definitive statement to satisfy the most critical service providers assuring non-enforcement, unfortunately TikTok will be forced to go dark on January 19,” said the company soon after the court’s verdict.
So, what does going dark mean?
So, far, there is no official statement on what exactly TikTok means by “going dark.” There is a lot of speculation out there on how exactly the app or website will look once TikTok shutters in the US.

Read more