I never knew the extent to how hurtful Facebook Trolling could be until I encountered this activity on my recent Facebook feed. Due to privacy and intimate reasons, I will not reveal the name of the deceased person nor the troll, but rather I’d want to explain more about this experience, and the immaturity strangers online have about the mourning of a dead person.
While learning about Facebook trolls in classes previously, I realized how important it was to understand the online memorials and how sentimental they are to the owners of the accounts. However, the idea of this type of memorial according to “Enter the Grief Police”, one of our readings from class, makes death feel cheap and artificial rather than genuine and really apart of our lives. By furthering this concept even with trolls on Facebook, it fabricates the death for not only the family, but those who are encountering the memorial and have a connection to the loved one who may have passed away. With this in mind, my experience reading the comments was very fabricated to say the least.
Online, the husband of the loved one who had passed kindly had asked everyone to respect his space as he takes in the hard events that had just passed. Naturally people are still going to comment and post in remembrance of his wife, but there happened to be more elaborate posts from random unanimous users describing about how she was meant to die, she did deserve the events that happened to her, etc. Fortunately, like the regulations read in class for Facebook deaths, accounts, and trolling on their Help page, the comments were immediately flagged and deleted by Facebook. Though these comments may be eliminated by the social media network, those words and thoughts will never leave the family’s heads, making the mourning processes even harder to recover.
In this circumstance, an online memorial was purposely pushed away by the husband to avoid such comments, but the trolls on Facebook are still present within the Facebook community. This accentuates the idea that online memorials are becoming more relied on for deaths, as well as the idea that there are still people out on social media trying to rupture the entirety of the mourning process, as well as break the community of this loved one down. Below you can click on the example similar to the one I experienced recently with Facebook:
“Internet/Facebook Trolls.” The UK & Ireland Database, 22 Sept. 2013.