According to
facebook Rusty Foster discovered him as a death in last week. He had been
locked out of his account, which had been turned into a "memorial
page," because someone had reported the Maine man as deceased to the
social media site.
Rusty 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, tipped off by
Foster, posted an article in which one editor "killed" another
editor, John Herrman, on Facebook. 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.
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.
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