Social media ‘Memories’ can be painful for survivors of gender-based violence: study
Global News
Dr. Nicolette Little examined Facebook Memories -- or 'social media ghosts' -- from the perspective of survivors of gender-based violence.
Seeing a photo from years ago pop up on your phone might be a positive reminder for some people, but for others, it can be problematic or even painful.
Research done at the University of Calgary — as part of a larger study on gender-based violence activism in Canada — took a deeper look at how Facebook Memories affected survivors of gender-based violence.
Dr. Nicolette Little, who is now a lecturer in the University of Alberta’s Media and Technology Studies program, conducted interviews with about a dozen people for a qualitative study, recently published in Feminist Media Studies.
“Because I’m an intersectional researcher, I also wanted to try to get people of different backgrounds, maybe class backgrounds, gender identity, just to speak to the experience from their perspective of having these social media ghosts come up,” Little told Global News.
Facebook’s Memories launched in 2015, assuming most people would enjoy the lookback. But, for survivors of gender-based violence, seeing previously posted photos of an abusive former acquaintance, relative or intimate partner can be traumatic.
“It was the disruption that these social media ghosts — or images that came up from the past — was having on the participants,” Little said. “Some of them were experiencing outright panic attacks: their stomach would get sick, they’d get sweaty, they’d have heart palpitations when an image of someone who’d abused them in a past relationship came up on their social media.”
“This was worsened when they’d blocked or deleted the individual as a friend because in those scenarios, they’d thought they’d had control and had taken care of the issue, but then these algorithms were still popping up the images of these past problematic partners.”
She explained the abuser could still show up in Memories even if the survivor has unfriended or blocked them.
