Facebook Saves Lives

This week Facebook have banned  the use of Social Media Suicide sites, blocking them from accessing the Facebook API. Erasing outdated profiles and removing last years tweets is becoming increasingly popular as prospective employers, clients and customer look to social media for an insight into the real you.

Is social media a platform for such moral battles?

Do Facebook have the right to stop your own social media suicide?

How important is a consistent social media profile for individuals, companies and online businesses?

What is Social Media Suicide?

Remember when MySpace came around and I had pictures of myself in a dress and Boyzone were my favourite band? Or those uni pics that just won’t go away!, No? Good!

Social Media suicide is an easily accessible way of removing a profile completely, erasing content and your history. The ability to remove a shady history (as above) is essential maintaining a correct and up to date online presence. Social media suicide is the complete removal of profiles from any given social network, be it Facebook, Twitter, Myspace or Linkedin.

For companies using social media, the ability to come to your potential customers with a clean and current profile is vital in portraying a professional outfit.

Social media was never meant to replace social life, if anything social media was there to enrich your social life. However, with twitter finally showing a slow down to user registration, people are now over the initial hype of social media and companies and people alike are starting to use their profiles more effectively.

The suicide machine since December has had over 60,000 friends deleted and over 200,000 tweets removed. Showing that people are keen to be removed from social networks.

Is Facebook Saving lives?

In a statement the social media platform said: “Web 2.0 Suicide Machine collects login credentials and scrapes Facebook pages, which are violations of our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. We’ve blocked the site’s access to Facebook as is our policy for sites that violate our SRR.”

Online euthanasia has therefore taken hold, you’ll soon have to visit a .ch (Swiss) domain to remove yourself from Facebook. The Morality issue has bridge the gap between life and digital, with online morality posting the most poignant of questions.

“Do you deserve the right to commit social media suicide?”