Social Media is Structured Around Good News and Can Be Devastating For Those Who Are Grieving

On Slate, Shannon Palus writes about the agonizing algorithms that keep sending ads for baby products to the mother of a child who was stillborn.

Taking time to process deep personal tragedy is one of the most trying tasks of being human. It is also an action that is inherently at odds with social media. Not in the content we post, necessarily—people like Brockell have bravely demonstrated that public platforms can be a place to share and connect over the bad stuff, too. But in the sense that the platforms themselves exist, ultimately, not to highlight and facilitate our social lives, but to profit off of them.

They don’t really have any concrete incentives to handle grief with care, and it shows. After posting about her stillborn son, Brockell continued to see ads for all manner of baby things. “[L]et me tell you what social media is like when you finally come home from the hospital with the emptiest arms in the world, after you’ve spent days sobbing in bed, and pick up your phone for a couple minutes of distraction before the next wail,” she wrote in a viral tweet Tuesday, also published in the Washington Post, addressed to tech companies. “It’s exactly, crushingly, the same as it was when your baby was still alive.”