Life and Death on Social Media

Maintaining social media profiles of dead people and creating social media profiles of human fetuses raises many ethical questions.

In this episode, Jess and David are joined by Associate Professor Tama Leaver, from Curtin University’s media school, to discuss the practices and viewpoints regarding social media pre-birth and post-death.

• Should we be more mindful that our posts can exist long after we’ve died? (1.56)
• It’s predicted that within 80 years there’ll be 4.9 billion Facebook users who’ll be deceased. How is Facebook managing this? (5.15)
• What about ‘the unborn’? Should parents be creating social media profiles of their children – those that can’t give their consent? (11.50)
• In the future, will we be able to chat online with deceased people or unborn children? (14.34)

Links:

• Tama Leaver: The ends of identity
• The Ethics Centre: Online grief and the digital dead

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Curtin University supports academic freedom of speech. The views expressed in The Future Of podcast may not reflect those of the university.

Music: OKAY by 13ounce Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported — CC BY-SA 3.0 Music promoted by Audio Library

You can read the full transcript for the episode here.