Inside “PGM” Facebook groups, the largest of which has 160,000+ members, where Brazilians collect, share, and memorialize the accounts of the recently deceased
how they looked, what political views they held, who they were friends with, and who tagged them in posts https://restofworld.org/... Garry Tan / @garrytan : Reminder that most new culture in the world is increasingly Internet culture https://restofworld.org/... Dr Renske Visser / @renske_visser : Facebook's underground obituary pages - Interesting piece including insight from my wonderful friend Andreia https://restofworld.org/... via @restofworld Tori Elliott / @telliotter : We are all struggling how to process grief in the Covid world—@decka227 and @pribellini take a look at how Facebook users in Brazil are using the platform to mourn and support each other through deaths old and new. @restofworld https://restofworld.org/... @restofworld : Some see sharing the Facebook profiles of dead people as macabre or creepy. But for others, it's a new kind of public mourning and a way to deal with grief https://restofworld.org/... Andrew Deck / @decka227 : In Brazilian Facebook groups, hundreds of thousands of members have been sharing the accounts of deceased users. @pribellini and I profile these groups, called Profiles de Gente Morta (or Profiles of Dead People), for @restofworld. https://restofworld.org/... Cengiz / @cengizyar : Eventually, Facebook may host more profiles of dead people than of people who are alive. In Brazil, users have been building social media obituary groups to memorialize those already lost. @pribellini & @decka227 report for @restofworld. https://restofworld.org/... Jaime Fuller / @j_fuller : “a death studies researcher at the University of Bath found that more than a third of the people in Werle's group had watched at least one virtual velório for someone they didn't know.” https://restofworld.org/... @restofworld : “Whenever I find out that someone died, I think, ‘Oh God, I have to post the profile for everyone to see it.’” https://restofworld.org/... Priscila Bellini / @pribellini : Many of us had to grieve the loss of loved ones from a distance amid the pandemic. But long before Covid, thousands of Brazilians were developing a way to mourn the deaths of strangers together. @decka227 and I profiled these groups for @restofworld https://restofworld.org/... @iethics : Group moderators “are responsible for approving all profiles submitted by other members... Each group has a slightly different culture, which is reflected in their policies”: https://restofworld.org/... #ethics #internet #socialmedia #contentmoderation @iethics : “Each profile link shared in PGM groups is a portal into the life of a total stranger: how they looked in photos, what political views they held, who they were friends with, and who tagged them in posts”: https://restofworld.org/... #ethics #internet #privacy #socialmedia #mourning @restofworld : Eventually, Facebook may host more profiles of dead people than of people who are alive. In Brazil, users have been building social media obituary groups to memorialize those already lost by @pribellini and @decka227 https://restofworld.org/... Louise Matsakis / @lmatsakis : This is one of my favorite stories I've ever edited! @decka227 @pribellini profiled the Brazilian Facebook groups where people share profiles of dead users https://restofworld.org/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook has been improvising its death policy for years: back in 2019 it promised to use AI to stop prompting users to reach out to deceased friends and rolled out a posthumous "tribute" section. But as this Rest of World reporting on PGM groups shows, Brazilian users built their own memorial infrastructure in parallel — volunteer-run groups, one with 160,000+ members, where moderators approve submissions of dead people's profiles. The same platform that fills an information gap for Latin American diaspora members reconnecting with lost relatives is also where grief gets crowdsourced.
The timing matters: Covid pushed death online across the board, from livestreamed funerals to a wave of end-of-life startups offering virtual grieving spaces. PGM groups are the informal, ungoverned edge of that shift — and they operate by sharing profile links that expose photos, political views, friend lists, and tags.
First-order effects
- PGM moderators become de facto gatekeepers over who gets memorialized and how, enforcing varying group policies with no oversight from Facebook itself.
- Families and friends of the deceased have their loved ones' full profile data — photos, political views, tags — circulated to groups of tens or hundreds of thousands of strangers, whether or not anyone consented.
Second-order effects
- Facebook faces a moderation gap it cannot ignore: its own tribute tools were designed for individual accounts, but PGM groups aggregate memorialization at population scale, pressuring the platform to define policy for user-created death communities rather than just deceased accounts.
- Privacy exposure cuts both ways — the scraped-and-shared profile data mirrors the dynamics behind the later flood of near-identical YouTube obituary videos built from scraped funeral-home content, signaling a broader market in other people's deaths.
Third-order effects
- Death on social platforms is splitting into two tracks — official product features (tributes, legacy contacts) and grassroots communities like PGM — forcing platforms and eventually regulators to decide which one sets norms around consent, data, and memorialization.
- If the pattern holds, end-of-life services formalize around the demand these groups prove exists, moving memorialization from ad-hoc volunteer moderation toward commercial and platform-governed offerings.
The trend: As more of life — and death — lives inside a few platforms' archives, memorialization is migrating from families and institutions to crowdsourced, platform-resident communities that outpace official policy.