On August 22, 2021, 47-year-old Hu Xudong died suddenly of illness in the office of Peking University. The departure of this poet and scholar with an optimistic personality and a wide range of contacts has brought great pain to relatives and friends, and has also set off lasting mourning in the cultural world. At the memorial service, friends and students silently prayed for him and sang a passionate "Ah friend goodbye" for him.
Hu Xudong's code name on the Internet is "Beard", although he always shows a baby face. Enter his homepage on the Douban app, you will see the words "The user is dead, this account has been locked and protected". A flower button under the profile picture of the homepage has been clicked more than 10,000 times, and clicking on "Bean Friends Who Came to Mourn" found that since the end of March, dozens of bunches of camellia have been served almost every day.
This is the mourning of the Cyber era presented as a flower of numbers. After being expressed, cyber mourning does not wither, does not quickly dissipate, and even joins and enriches the digital relics of the mourned - in those "flowers", messages, follow-ups, forwards, the voice of the deceased re-emerges.
Numbers pity
The rebuilder of life has emotional sustenance
"The digital legacy has a lot of meaning for me, and it can even be said that he (Hu Xudong)'s cyberbody is evidence of his existence. I don't like WeChat voice very much, but now I feel a little relieved to think that there is his voice that can be heard at any time on my phone, but I haven't had the courage to open it and listen to it yet..."
A few months later, Hu Xudong's wife, Azi (screen name), still has difficulty accepting the reality of his departure. She said that she does not often return to her husband's digital relics to meditate, because it will be sad, but in the future, these relics should be a great comfort for her daughter, and it is a record of children being loved by their fathers. What Ah Zi cherishes most is the more intimate daily chat history. Her husband's WeChat is still the top contact, which is a little source of her sense of security. As for the relics that are public, she said, they are already "everyone's beards", not only her own.
In the view of the Guangzhou poet Li Heng, Hu Xudong is his mentor and friend, and his influence and help are very great. The bad news made him sad, and even made him feel trance. Every time Li Heng clicked on the sign of the deceased on the homepage, he felt "absurd": how a living person suddenly became a digital tombstone!
Another Douban netizen, Dasha, whose original name was Chen Ning, died of illness in December 2012. He is a media man and amateur translator, loves poetry, loves Rilke's poetry, and single-handedly built Rilke's Chinese network. Now his Douban account also has the words "lock protection".
Dasha's close friend, artist and curator Zhou Yan recalled that she and Dasha interacted more on Douban and had a lot of private message exchanges, but she and Dasha actually knew each other very little. However, his death was second only to her father's death. Now she often returns to Dasha's Douban homepage or looks through the conversation records of the two.
Other platforms have similar accounts. At the beginning of last year, a "B station UP master" - "Mocha Official" was exposed to death and rushed to weibo hot search, and his experience triggered a large number of netizens to sympathize. On January 23, 2021, @Bilibili Danmaku issued an announcement verifying that the owner of the up , "Mocha Official" died of illness at his residence, and said that his account would be listed as a "commemorative account" with the consent of his family.
March 18, 2022, is the tenth anniversary of the death of The Weibo blogger Who Walking Meal due to depression, the last Weibo message released by him before his death has exceeded 1 million, and the forwarding has exceeded 116,000, and the Microblog of the Meal has become the emotional sustenance and talk of many "life rebuilders".
Platform protection
Account protection measures tend to be "frozen"
Among the domestic Internet platforms, Douban was the first to begin to protect the information of deceased user accounts. But this protection mechanism surfaced because of an accident.
In March 2018, the page of the deceased douban user "lost contact" in a large area. First, someone found that the account of Jiang Xulin, a college teacher who died in 2016, could not be opened, and then the bean friends found that the personal homepage of a large number of deceased people showed that "the web page you want to visit does not exist." For a time, the bean friends were indignant, and some people suspected that the deceased user had not logged in for a long time or had not bound the mobile phone number and had been cleared, and they thought that such a practice was simple and rude and could not be tolerated.
A few days later, Douban responded that the problem was a bug in the background mechanism to protect the accounts of deceased users, and all of them returned to normal after repairing. The response did not explain in detail the operation mode of the protection mechanism, but in the past few years, Douban has not had similar accidents.
The relevant person in charge of Douban said in a recent interview with Nandu that users who have confirmed the status of death will be converted to the deceased state by the platform. In order to ensure the security of the account, the account will be locked and protected, and the original binding information will be unbound and login will no longer be supported. Their close relatives can cancel their accounts or resume normal status by submitting relevant information.
Under normal circumstances, their close relatives can only modify the status of their accounts, and they cannot obtain account passwords. If a close relative raises a claim for privacy-related content, Douban will handle it in accordance with the law.
For the deceased user to set the deceased state, mourning icon, for the spiritual significance of the deceased user, the relevant person in charge of Douban said, "The existence of the account itself is the way of the user's mental property continuation, which can continue to radiate its social circle layer for a long time, so as long as the user or his close relatives and entrusted contacts do not propose to cancel, we will choose to retain their account and its content creation during their lifetime, and also retain the spiritual connection between users." The person in charge also revealed that in the future, consider adding "entrusted contact settings" and "automatic deletion settings" to allow users to make choices for the disposal planning of digital heritage in advance.
Similar protection mechanisms have been launched on other platforms in recent years.
It is reported that Bilibili (hereinafter referred to as Station B) is the first Internet company in China to launch a commemorative account. On December 24, 2020, Station B issued an announcement that from today, for users of Station B who have unfortunately passed away, the platform will list their accounts as "commemorative accounts" and protect them after obtaining confirmation and consent from their immediate family members.
It is reported that at the moment of successful application, the account will be frozen, and no one will be able to log in. At the same time, the functions of charging and tipping of the account will also be turned off one by one. On the personal homepage of the deceased, there will be a mourning message from the official B station.
The relevant person in charge of Station B said that the copyright of the original manuscript belongs to the user, and after the user's death, it belongs to his legal heir, and the heir can rely on the certification materials to request the original manuscript income in the deceased user's account from the platform. For other content produced by users, such as comment bullet screens, station B respects the user's pre-life settings; the user's pre-life settings are still exploring and exploring.
According to nandu reporters, more than 50 users have applied for it, and eight users have successfully set up commemorative accounts. It is worth noting that Station B is about to revise the "commemorative account" function, which will provide users with the choice of information processing method under the commemorative account and the corresponding settings after the revision.
In 2021, Douyin set up memorial accounts for the deceased for 30 users. For the suspected deceased account reported by the user, the platform will require the feedback user to provide personal identification certificates, proof of relationship with the deceased, death certificate of the deceased and other proof materials, and once the relevant materials are reviewed and confirmed, the platform will set a protection status for the account, and will not be able to change the mobile phone number, password, and real-name information to avoid account theft and illegal use.
If the deceased user's account still contains a personal privacy part, such as chat history, friend list, etc., is his or her immediate family eligible to hold the account password?
In this regard, the relevant person in charge of Douyin said that after verifying the materials, the financial assets under the account can be transferred to the account of the heir, "but if it is necessary to inherit and continue to use the account of the deceased user, you need to provide relevant testamentary proof." Otherwise, after Douyin turns on account protection, anyone will be prohibited from logging in/posting/modifying/deleting account content. "If the deceased user has a will, allowing the heir to inherit his Douyin account, after the heir completes the account inheritance action, he can send a top post, respond to a friend request, update the avatar and background image, etc., but not have the right to log in to the account, view messages and delete friend requests."
The Weibo blogger "Walking Rice", who died ten years ago, was once stolen, and the number thieves used their accounts to cheat. On September 17, 2020, after Weibo released the "Announcement on protecting the accounts of the deceased", in order to protect the privacy of the deceased and prevent the theft of their accounts, Weibo will set a protection status for the accounts of the deceased, that is, it cannot log in, cannot send new content, cannot delete content, and cannot change the status. Sina Weibo will judge the identity of the deceased of the account user through a variety of means such as news reports, feedback from relatives and friends, and manual identification, and will not be confused with the long-term inactive "zombie number". After the identity of the deceased is verified and confirmed in a timely manner, the protection will be activated immediately. In fact, before the announcement, Weibo's protection of the deceased's account was already a routine work.
In terms of protecting the privacy of the deceased's Weibo account, the Weibo party said that if the deceased's relatives have special requirements and provide relevant certification materials (death certificate + household registration book / marriage certificate valid content photo /scan) to Weibo, Weibo will hand over the deceased account to his relatives, but the account can only log in to commemorate the occasion, and cannot publish new content and change account settings.
The platform's protection measures for accounts tend to be "frozen". In this regard, Liu Tao, secretary of the party committee and doctoral supervisor of the School of Journalism and Communication of Jinan University, believes that there is still something to explore in legal terms, and the wishes of users themselves should be paid more attention to. He felt that it was still necessary to improve it in the system of protocols or a set of agreements, such as making a digital will, specifying its heirs, and the new owner could close the account or continue to operate, rather than just "freezing" the option.
Burn after reading
I want my digital traces to be erased
The digital legacy left by the deceased is mostly long-term for relatives and friends. But is your own digital legacy needed, or should it be retained? This is a matter of disagreement. Hu's wife, Azi, said she probably still hopes to preserve it as much as possible and "prove that she has existed", but she feels that the biggest problem may be how long these platforms can exist.
Mr. Li said bearded young friends had backed up his online blogs and some of his major works because they were worried about the site's own survival. What worries him is that although digital media is very convenient, information dissemination is very efficient, and the cost is very low for individual users in a sense, the platform is extremely fragile, and it is actually expensive to maintain a stable platform service.
One of the settings of the science fiction movie Blade Runner 2049 is that one day in the future there will be a global blackout. The information on many storage devices in human society has disappeared. Out of this anxiety, Li Heng from time to time to back up his information and works, backups come in various forms, there may be computer mailboxes, network disks or paper versions, just rely on a network platform, he still feels that there is a lot of uncertainty.
And many "post-95s" have made it clear that they do not want to completely preserve their digital heritage to their families.
It is reported that in 2020-2021, a total of 223 "post-00s" made wills in the China Probate Bank, of which 17.3% involved digital inheritance. Xiao Xu, a post-95 netizen, believes that listing digital heritage in a will may help family and friends better understand the other side of themselves that they don't know, and he understands this practice. However, for himself, he will only leave the virtual property to his family, and the social platform account hopes to be permanently cancelled before he dies.
"The content I surf the Web will be a bit 'socially dead' if it is seen by others. Therefore, I do not want to be included in the heritage, but I only hope to destroy it immediately after death. Xiao Feng said after 95. Xiao Xie, a post-00s generation, also holds the same view - publicity is "social death", which may be the idea of more young people, even if it is open to their parents.
Curator Zhou Yan has a more open-minded view on the preservation of digital heritage. Dasha's close friend Lao Chen opened the "Dasha Footprints" group on Douban, and later he wrote off Douban, and transferred the management of this group to Zhou Yan before deregistration. Zhou Yan said that Lao Chen also wanted to set up a permanent prize in a German translation competition in honor of Dasha, but in the end it was not successful.
Zhou Yan felt that Dasha would not care about these forms of commemoration, he would hope that people would continue to study and translate German poets such as Rilke and Hölderlin, and it would be better to forget him - he was like the fish in his own poems, he did not know life or death, he was at ease, we were too persistent but let him laugh.
Having said that, Zhou Yan still cherishes the digital traces left by his friends. She said that after using social media, she slowly met many friends, some of whom were connected in heart and loved and cherished each other. Zhou Yan people are abroad, and they can't meet with friends often, so the bits and pieces on the Internet are the bits and pieces of their lives. She hopes that the traces of her friends will be kept intact, "You don't know who, when, will quietly visit the deceased friend again, what traces he or she touched." ”
Paradoxically, Zhou Yan doesn't want her network traces to remain, or it can be understood that she is not attached to it. She said:
"My life will eventually be only briefly preserved in the presence of a very small number of loved ones, and as they depart, they will inevitably fall into the water like snowflakes. I love this kind of complete embrace by the vast and unobstructed, it is the true equality I yearn for the most in my life, so what trace do I want? There is no trace of anyone. ”
focus
Is it easy to eliminate your own digital traces?
Multi-platform provides deregistration services
Maybe it's not as simple as it seems. Once the traces or content are generated, they will be included in the database and become an important asset of the platform, providing the platform for analysis, sampling, promotion... Many times, even if users want to quit, the platform is not necessarily willing to hand over the control of this data so happily.
However, there are still more and more platforms that offer "logout functionality".
◎ Vibrato
After the cancellation is completed, Douyin will retain the relevant log records for no less than 6 months in accordance with the relevant laws and regulations, and then delete the user's personal information or anonymize it. This information includes, but is not limited to, identity and content information submitted by users, friendships, published video content, comments, likes, favorites and other identities and content information.
◎Station B
Provide self-service account cancellation service, and then the ID name will be changed to "user has logged out (digital)" words, but there is a video released by the owner of the up said that you can still find the video, audio, and comments that the logged off user originally voted.
◎Douban
The platform provides users with the function of canceling their accounts from the beginning of the establishment of the website, and the user has the right to demand the elimination of the traces left on the platform, and can independently delete the content published by themselves.
Coordinator: Fang Jun, Dong Xiaoyan
Written by: Nandu reporter Fang Jun Dong Shuyun Dong Xiaoyan Li Simeng Intern Zhang Liti Cui Mianqu Guo Yixuan