I clicked the young woman’s profile. It did not appear to be a pre-teen profile and instead contained all the hallmarks of a twenty-something I had assumed based upon the variety of images of friends around the same age. Her public page proudly displayed recent selfies from college life, with older posts from high school. It looked legit, but still, coming off a recent episode where someone tried to create a fake Instagram profile in my name, the tin-foil hat in me thought this might be some elaborate attempt to create a sock-puppet account.
Still, the name was so unique and continued to tickle my brain. So I called the mother of my daughter’s best and asked, “Do you have a relative that shares the same name as your daughter?”
“Yes, my niece,” she said. “Why do you ask?”
I’d be curious, too, if a guy in his mid-forties were asking about her twenty-two-year-old relative. I don’t deny that’s totally sus. I explained the puzzling Facebook friend recommendation, and we laughed it off. Still, I wondered why Facebook imagined we might make for good online pals. She was legal but still half my age. What did we have in common?
The connection wasn’t her aunt because we aren’t connected on Facebook; we typically communicate instead over email or text. Now my mind raced further. Was Facebook exploiting contacts in my personal address book to infer new connections? I initially dismissed this as being too nefarious, even for Mark Zuckerberg in his vision to connect the world.
I scanned the girl’s page again, trying to understand what that algorithm assumed to be a logical connection. From her public profile, I could tell she was on the basketball team in high school. And I once attended a high school that also had a basketball team, though I never played. Close enough, I guess?
As I couldn’t imagine any data scientist developing a recommendation engine that ludicrous, I hit the one link that I should have clicked from the start — our mutual friend in common.
He was also a twenty-something, my brother-in-law’s nephew by marriage. Someone I’d occasionally see at extended family gatherings. We’re talking twice a year tops, perhaps for a holiday event. At one point, several years ago, between sips of eggnog, we friended on Facebook. Because, why not?
The inner workings of the algorithm were starting to make sense. We never engaged on Facebook, but given his age and location, he ran in the same circles as this young woman. So why not ask if we’d like to buddy up digitally?
The problem is, he died nearly a year ago.
Facebook has a process that allows people to managed situations when a user has passed away. According to their policies and reporting, Facebook will memorialize an account if they are told that a person has died. Those memorialized accounts will allow friends and family to continue to share memories while securing them from unauthorized access, says Facebook. But that requires reporting to the support team, which now has “fewer people available to review reports because of the coronavirus pandemic.”