Digital Mourning Practices and Emotional Expression on Social Media

Digital mourning encompasses the array of practices by which individuals commemorate loss and articulate grief through online platforms. Far from a simple transfer of traditional rituals to a virtual sphere, these practices involve novel modes of emotional expression, communal solidarity and identity work. Social media affordances—such as memorial pages, hashtags, comment threads and multimedia sharing—enable mourners to curate narratives, display symbolic tokens and sustain dialogues with both known contacts and wider publics. This ongoing interaction between private sorrow and public display reshapes cultural conventions around death, transforms notions of presence and absence, and can foster both support networks and contested meanings. The persistence of profiles after death raises ethical considerations around ownership, privacy and authenticity, while algorithmic curations influence which tributes gain visibility. Emerging analytical approaches, ranging from qualitative digital ethnography to computational text analysis, have begun to chart emotional lexicons, engagement patterns and platform policies. As digital mourning becomes global in scope, cross-cultural comparisons reveal both shared strategies—such as collective memorial hashtags—and locally specific rituals adapted to linguistic, religious and regulatory contexts. Practical applications include design recommendations for platform governance, bereavement support initiatives and guidelines for respectful digital commemoration.

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Digital Mourning Practices and Emotional Expression on Social Media publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in digital mourning practices and emotional expression on social media across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Digital mourning: The practice of expressing grief and remembrance through online platforms and social media.

Social media affordances: Functional characteristics of platforms that enable or constrain user interactions and content sharing.

Digital ethnography: A qualitative research method involving immersive observation and analysis of online communities and interactions.

Social capital: Resources and support derived from social networks, here mobilised through digital interactions.

Account retention: The persistence of a deceased person’s social media profile and its management by platforms and users.

References

1. Like, share, and remember: Facebook memorial Pages as social capital resources. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (2022).
2. #MournHub and @GrieveWatch: Mediating monarchy and mourning in the digital age. International Journal of Cultural Studies (2023).
3. Digital Mourning: The Retention Significance and Realistic Dilemma of the Online Social Media Platform. Media and Communication Research (2023).