Abstract
For death-online scholars, online rituals of loss and death help to challenge and reinforce social and moral order. The digital mediates, remediates and ‘mediatises’ both life and death. While grieving is an individual, internal process, mourning is an external practice that can help to connect us with others. Mourning is culturally specific. It is collective. Through posting eulogies online and sharing experiences of loss, we can enhance our grief literacy through grief vernaculars. The role of the digital in connecting us to informal processes of mourning and memorialisation is vast. However, what about the people who choose not to share online? Who decides not to post their tributes, eulogies and memories online? This article seeks to explore this under-researched phenomenon. Much like ‘non-use’, unshareability and non-sharing are crucial parts of contemporary digital culture. In this article, we investigate experiences of unshareability. Drawing from over 57 interviews with participants dealing with all types of loss and grief, we focus on examples of seven participants who spoke about the complications with sharing and choices not to share. We explore those tensions and how this reflects grievabilities – who is digitally mournable and who is not.
Introduction
Social media platforms have become spaces for sharing deeply personal experiences like grief, loss and mourning (Thimm & Nehls, 2017). While digital mourning offers new ways to commemorate loved ones and seek support, it also raises questions about the types of grieving practices encouraged in these online domains – what is shared and what isn’t. For scholars studying death online, digital rituals surrounding loss and mourning both challenge and reinforce social and moral norms (Graham et al., 2013; Kohn et al., 2019; Walter et al., 2012). The digital sphere mediates, remediates and ‘mediatises’ both life and death (Christensen & Gotved, 2015). While grief is an individual and internal experience, mourning is an external practice that fosters connections with others. Mourning is culturally specific and inherently collective. The digital realm plays a significant role in facilitating informal mourning and memorialisation practices (Hoskins, 2011; Van Dijck, 2007).
Nicholas John’s (2017) book The Age of Sharing explores the multifaceted concept of sharing in contemporary society. He examines how sharing has become a ubiquitous practice, encompassing a wide range of activities and interactions facilitated by digital technologies and social media. He emphasises the role of mobile media in amplifying the act of sharing. These platforms have made it easier for people to share all aspects of their lives, integrating sharing into daily routines. This extends to our most personal experiences of grief and loss. Christensen and Gotved (2015) explore the dynamics of grief in online spaces, emphasising the sociocultural implications of sharing loss digitally. They show how online platforms have facilitated a resurgence of public mourning, allowing individuals to share their grief more openly and publicly than in traditional settings. The online world also provides new communal spaces where individuals can learn about and share grief, creating communities and connection. Recent mapping of the field confirms that social media has shifted many grief practices from private to public spheres, and that research to date clusters around a set of recurring functions: seeking support, maintaining continuing bonds, digital memorialisation and ritual, community formation and emotional expression. A recent scoping review of 61 English-language studies from 2010 to 2025 identified these five core themes, emphasising both the promise and the empirical limits of current knowledge (Liang et al., 2025).
Recent work in the fields of memory studies and digital ethnography has paid attention to the phenomenon of digital media ‘witnessing’ as a way to make sense of the feelings and subsequent mourning rituals that follow loss, especially within publicly broadcast events, crises and disasters (Frosh & Pinchevski, 2008; Hjorth & Cumiskey, 2018; McGrane et al., 2022). A common thread between this research and that of grief specialists like David Kessler (2019, 2020) is the acknowledgement that individuals need to be ‘seen’ and ‘witnessed’ in their grief. Put differently, spaces and opportunities where people can share their grief and be witnessed in it are vital for sense-making following a loss (Cook, 2025). But what about those who choose not to share online? Those who refrain from posting tributes, eulogies or memories? What about the grief that cannot be shared due to stigma (such as suicide or addiction)? This article does not seek to conclude but to listen to the questions our participants pose through their digital mourning practices: How is grief enacted, shared and withdrawn in online spaces where loss is silenced, stigmatised or invisible?
Grievabilities, Vernaculars and Grief Policing
As social media users are negotiating new norms for engaging in and reacting to online mourning practices, not all types and aspects of grief are shared equally on social media. Judith Butler’s (2016) concept of ‘grievability’, introduced in works like Frames of War, explores how social frameworks determine whose lives are recognised as grievable. Butler argues that lives deemed ungrievable are effectively dehumanised, as they exist outside the social norms that confer value and recognition. Non-grievable losses may lead to non-sharing, as their impact is unacknowledged and unaccepted by others. This is what Psychologist Kenneth Doka (2020) calls disenfranchised grief, drawing the line between what forms of grief are normalised, witnessed and sharable in cultures and, importantly, which are not. In our increasingly digitalised world, these concepts of non-grievability and non-shareability now need to be adapted to online spaces.
We argue that understanding the technological affordances of online platforms is essential when considering non-sharing, as users’ willingness and ability to share their grief online may be impacted by what platform algorithms deem grievable, acceptable and sharable. For instance, social media platforms currently employ algorithms to detect and manage content related to suicide, aiming to identify at-risk individuals. Facebook, Instagram and TikTok utilise artificial intelligence (AI) to flag searches and posts that may indicate suicidal intent, subsequently referring users to helplines (Ducharme, 2024). These automated systems often alert moderators when specific keywords, such as ‘suicide’, are detected, prompting further review. However, the effectiveness of these measures varies, with some platforms facing criticism for failing to adequately detect and address harmful content. Users who want to bypass the algorithm use so-called algospeak (Steen et al., 2023), which involves abbreviating, misspelling or substituting specific words in social media to circumvent a platform’s content moderation systems, for example, by using suicide synonyms like ‘unaliving’ or ‘self-murder’ or punctuation like s**cide, D€@TH, D!€D to mask their content (Klug et al., 2023; Tait, 2022).
While intended to block harmful content, this censorship might also prevent supportive discussions (Schock et al., 2025). It might also deter some users from posting altogether when blocked by the algorithm. These and similar content moderation initiatives are subject to social media trends and platform tech parent companies’ leadership directions, which makes them unstable, as we have seen in recent META’s rejection of previous fact-checking and content moderation strategies. Whether there will be changes to how suicide-related content is currently managed is, at this point in 2025, unclear. Parallel with this, we must also consider that the complete avoidance of the word suicide can lead to isolation and disenfranchised grief (Padmanathan et al., 2019), dictating who is grievable and in which ways. Disenfranchised feelings can become ghosts in our social media feeds, haunting and lingering in and around mobile media (Cumiskey & Hjorth, 2017). This is when users become unable to find their voice to bear witness.
Hashtags play a key role in ordering and giving visibility to some expressions of grief, while masking others. For Moa Eriksson Krutrök (2021, p. 2), grief hashtags create and curate their own vocabularies or ‘vernaculars of grief’, which are the ‘shared conventions and grammars of communication, which emerge from the ongoing interactions between platforms and users’. By sharing eulogies and loss experiences online, individuals can develop grief literacy through shared grief vernaculars (Gibbs et al., 2015). Eriksson Krutrök (2021, p. 1) considers how the uses of platform affordances, that is their capabilities, uses and opportunities, ‘extend and/or diverge from societal norms of mourning’. Hashtagging is a key affordance of social media that curates content and makes it searchable (boyd et al., 2010). Specific social media platforms give way to certain hashtag logics or grammars (Highfield & Leaver, 2016), influencing what grief experiences are highlighted in the spotlight and which are dragged offstage. Non–bereavement-related losses, for instance, are rarely in the spotlight, like anticipatory grief associated with dementia – mourning the loss of memories, future, connection and self (Lemos Dekker, 2023).
However, intense grief expressions that may be helpful in private or therapeutic settings could potentially cause harm when shared publicly online (Doyle et al., 2024). This presents design challenges for platforms to balance supporting users’ healing through sharing while protecting others from harmful content. Despite these concerns, online forums appear to have relevant additional value as a platform for discussing grief and finding support (Schotanus-Dijkstra et al., 2014). Eriksson Krutrök (2021) notes while social media platforms can create a space for different forms of grief vernaculars, they can also be places for ‘grief policing’ (Abidin, 2018). In online communities, grief is ‘policed’ as a function of established social norms (Abidin, 2018; Gach et al., 2017) and platform moderators and algorithms to protect users from harm, retraumatisation (Andalibi & Forte, 2018) or grief cycling (Baglione et al., 2018).
Finally, there is self-policing as a form of pre-censorship of how one presents oneself online as a reflexive form of conformity (Kim et al., 2024). Traditional offline norms still influence online mourning behaviours, and users may struggle with the appropriateness of certain interactions, such as ‘liking’ posts about death (Wagner, 2018), or with the affectivity of the shared content, which sometimes leads to digital disconnection (Kaun, 2021). Kaun (2021) suggests digital disconnection ‘as a form of negative choice, the decision to not use, participate, or contribute to digital platforms’ (p. 1474) and grounds it into the current moment of modernity as a self-regulatory act. Grief literature, however, notes that grievers toggle between the benefits of online connection and the need to disconnect when the content is too affective (Cook, 2025), indicating that both connection and disconnection can be self-regulatory acts.
In certain contexts, non-sharing may also be a deliberate choice rather than a socially or algorithmically dictated act. Cook (2025), for instance, explored how bereaved participants used digital technologies like online grief cafés, support forums and text-based counselling to support their grief, with some deliberately deciding not to share by just wanting to observe and listen. Cook (2025) proposed that the voluntary nature of online settings and social media may help individuals to regain a sense of control during grief by allowing them to adopt a passive, ‘hidden’ role in an online group grief session and thereby supporting their fundamental, psychological need for autonomy and freedom.
The complex interplay between social media and mourning processes highlights both benefits and drawbacks in the digital expression of grief, so it is not surprising that some users decide not to share. Similar to the concept of ‘non-use’ (Satchell & Dourish, 2009), the act of not sharing is becoming an essential aspect of contemporary culture. This has been explored in other fields of social media research, from digital non-sharing of public news (Mathews et al., 2024), personal opinions (Sakariassen & Meijer, 2021) or photos (Odoi, 2024) to complete disconnection as part of social media breaks (Spilioti & Giaxoglou, 2024). However, from algorithmic to self-censorship, what is not being shared online remains under-researched in the grief literature. This emphasises the importance of studying situations where people do not use technology, challenging the traditional focus on usability in Human–Computer Interaction. Applying this to mobile medial mourning, this article investigates experiences of unshareability and non-sharing as a neglected, yet crucial part of contemporary digital culture.
Methods
This article explores interview data from a broader project using ethnographic and creative practice research approaches to understand mourning on mobile media. In this 4-year study, we interviewed over 57 expert participants with lived experience as well as professionals in the grief space in Australia who also have lived experience. We sought to capture a variety of loss experiences – from death of a parent, child and animal to more existential forms of loss in terms of climate grief, loss of health or career change. Recruitment occurred through social media as well as through advisory partners such as Grief Australia and Griefline. The interviews were conducted online and ran for 1 to 2 hr. The interviews did not have set questions; rather, participants were asked to share their experiences and how social media was used (or not used) for grieving. This participant-led method was chosen so that participants were in charge of the interview direction, allowing them to navigate the difficult subject matter in ways that they felt comfortable with and in control of. After ethics approval was obtained, interviews were conducted between November 2023 and are still ongoing. During the initial interviews, we became aware that some participants were actively not sharing as a strategy for coping and taking control of the situation. They discussed choosing to disconnect from social media or ‘non-sharing’ as a legitimate form of contemporary grief practice. It is this non-sharing phenomenon we explore in this article, as understanding these motivations for disconnection or non-sharing can provide insights into the role of digital disconnection for grieving communities online.
Participants
In this article, we focus on a subset of seven participants whose responses brought the complexities associated with non-sharing into our focus. They were selected through iterative team discussions by reviewing interview summaries and transcripts due to their focus on strategies for disconnection, non-sharing and the dynamic between the use and strategic non-use of mobile media in bereavement. These seven participants experienced a range of losses, including multiple losses; three were interviewed as grief experts (one grief educator, one funeral director and one grief counsellor) and four as lived-experience participants, although participants also had personal experiences of loss and bereavement (see Table 1).
Participant Overview.
Tom is a mature aged man who, as a young man, lost first his mother and then his grandfather to suicide. More recently, his son died of a suicide too. This led to a complete career change and to becoming an active leader in the suicide awareness community nationally. Tom wanted to talk about his personal experience, and he was interviewed as lived-experience participant. Sam is a young mother who lost a firstborn son to sudden infant death and is now navigating the intricacies of life after this unexpected loss. Annie is experiencing multiple losses and grief, including loss of health, relationship, predictable life trajectory and is dealing with a significant ecogrief due to her work in the climate space. Alexa experienced a profound shock after the loss of her adult son due to suicide and is now working to support other families during grief. Jack has lost a close friend to suicide too, which led him to enter a funeral industry with a desire to humanise it. He is an end-of-life doula, a grief educator for men and a funeral director. Jessica and Melanie are educators and leaders in grief and have both experienced bereavements that made them intimately aware of the nature of grief and are now informing their work in a grief space. Collectively, the stories of these seven people revealed a complex dynamic that involved sharing and non-sharing grief online as well as the invisible forms of grief presented on social media platforms and the skewed picture of grief this creates.
Analysis
Our analytic approach followed an iterative (inductive) thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2021). Early transcripts were reviewed to grasp the breadth and depth of the data and to identify initial patterns and themes. These were collaboratively refined in a co-author workshop and further developed as additional interviews were completed, allowing the analysis to remain responsive to participants’ complex lived worlds. As the process unfolded, non-sharing emerged as a salient phenomenon, leading us to focus this article on that dimension of the data. Our iterative and reflexive approach enhanced analytic sensitivity to the diverse ways participants experienced, expressed or withheld their grief online. The discussion is organised around three interlinked themes: (a) less visible forms of grief; (b) the tension between digital connection and personal boundaries; and (c) fragmented mourning: negotiating grief and fragmented narratives in digital spaces.
Circulation of Unshareablefeelings: The Ways Social Media Connects and Disconnects
While the online world has arguably provided new communal spaces where individuals can share personal content including grief, thus creating communities and connection in a time otherwise marked by loneliness, this affordance comes with complexity. We previously suggested that digital mourning offers new ways to commemorate loved ones, share grief and seek support, raising questions about the types of grieving practices that are vitalised in these domains. These questions eventually lead to what is shared and what is not shared online.
Less Visible Forms of Grief
Some losses (e.g. death by suicide or overdose) remain algorithmically and socially unacknowledged, making individual experiences of grief obscured. Complicated deaths are bound to find less space on social media compared to other losses not only due to societal definitions of grievability, self-policing because of stigma or self-care but also due to platform algorithms (Schock et al., 2025). Our discussion earlier in this article explored the challenges with platform algorithms that render certain forms of loss and grief invisible, such as death by suicide, and the creativity users apply to circumvent these forms of grief policing (e.g. #unaliving). Beyond the need to communicate these less visible forms of grief within the social public, our research participants also point to the need to understand how digital media works and what it does to mediate death and grief.
For example, 50-year-old father Tom (pseudonym), whose 19-year-old son died by suicide before Tom quit his previous career and trained as a suicide prevention advocate and expert, narrates his grief journey and complex grieving of a loss by suicide. For Tom, the recent death of his son comes after the death of his mother (also by suicide) when he was only 18 years old, followed by the death of his grandfather (suicide), who, in Tom’s words. could not cope with the overwhelming grief. Tom contributes this complex history of loss and grief to his commitment to raising awareness about suicidal risk and prevention. He often uses social media in his work and says:
There is a clear evolution of my posts around (my son’s) death. In the early days, the language I used was probably incorrect, but I recognised early on that there was potential danger in doing it incorrectly. Things like memorial posts and stuff like that have to be done properly, especially for suicide. For example, not sharing location, because we don’t want anyone copycatting, is especially important when it involves youth. I recognized that . . . because I went so public. I was contacted very early on by people in distress from all over the country, which freaked me out a lot. From that point on, I started training myself in suicide First Aid and in the use of safe language.
Tom’s experience with social media shows how grief policing (Abidin, 2018), self-policing and affective witnessing operate. Soon after posting about his son’s death by suicide, he was contacted by people, some of whom experienced suicidal distress, some had lost someone to suicide, and some had objections to Tom’s grief including the detail of his son’s death being communicated on a public platform. The ‘copycat effect’ is known in suicide studies as a psychological phenomenon in which publicity following a suicide leads to an increase in suicide emulation (Gualtieri et al., 2024). Tom learnt about this when he shared the details about his son’s death in a personal digital eulogy. He was soon alerted that this post could trigger a ‘copycat effect’. He was not discouraged by this; rather, as he shares above, he took this as an opportunity to educate himself in suicide prevention, awareness and literacy. Tom further elaborates on challenges in navigating the visibilities and invisibilities of grief online, particularly for those bereaved through a death by suicide:
I’m just coming up towards the 5th anniversary soon (of the death of my son) and you know my posts are very different now. In the early days, I shared a few photos of my boy, and my wife was uncomfortable with that. We have decided that we won’t do that anymore. He was a very private person and it’s a personal thing. People know he died and how he died. And they know why I’m doing what I’m doing. It’s tricky because we want to get the word out there but there’s a constant line between awareness and danger. We won’t share anything that could be a location or potential method. If I see something that’s potentially dangerous (on social media), I’ll send them a personal message and try to educate and explain to them why it is potentially dangerous, but then that’s up to them if they choose to take that down or not.
For Tom, like many other bereaved parents, navigating social media presence and grief comes with significant challenges. Tom shares the frustration over unspoken and unacknowledged forms of grief while recognising complications in responsible communication about death on social media. Tom also straddles the tension of his commitment to suicide prevention and awareness and to using his life story to educate about suicidality with his and his family’s decision to keep the story of his son’s life and death private and the risk of mystifying death by suicide. The decision-making Tom applies daily in his digital communication requires significant time and skill, something that often goes unrecognised in digital death and mourning. Tom’s experience highlights challenges that grief professionals, researchers and digital communities need to recognise: the often-unseen emotional and ethical labour required to navigate visibility, responsibility and care in online mourning spaces.
For Jessica, a successful podcaster and digital media content creator whose content addresses grief, being able to honestly communicate about mourning with her audience is essential. Yet Jessica also notes this requirement for transparency and authenticity is unrealistic and, at times, conflicts with what is deemed a grievable loss:
There’s definitely personal grief that’s not shared on social media, mainly around my relationship with my dad, who is still alive and that’s out of respect for [him]. I wouldn’t be able to talk about it candidly without upsetting him, and that just doesn’t feel right. I guess there are parts of my grief relating to my family background and historical events with my mum and my dad that don’t get shared. But we are also very open about our experiences, and I think that’s what has built that trust and the relationship with our audience, because we do keep it real and bring them on the journey with us, and I think that’s probably what has set us apart.
We can see in Jessica’s story that the invisibility of certain types of grief (such as family dynamics and estrangement) is only indirectly due to community and platform censoring. Some grief is less visible because it is socially unacknowledged (Lemos Dekker, 2023) and due to the contextual and relational dynamics underlying specific forms of loss. Ethical and relational dimensions are inseparable from digital mourning. Compounded with a lack of grief literacy within networked publics (boyd et al., 2010), this further complicates what is shared and what is not shared online. While ‘non-sharing’ can be framed in terms of ‘disconnection’, we also see it as an active way of navigating the unevenness of grief literacy.
Beyond the doings of platforms, there is an element of self-censorship evident in the participants’ experiences with communicating about loss, death and grief. Jack, a death celebrant, end-of-life doula and funeral director, notes that:
Some forms of death are less palatable than others. And it takes a lot more courage for people to speak that truth, even though that truth needs to be communicated too . . . I think the media work is important to prevent exacerbating suicidal ideation, but speaking the truth is also important so that people can understand the extent of different types of deaths. It is harder for people to speak to those more complicated death experiences, and it is also harder for people to hear them. And it comes down to us generally not being familiar with those experiences because it’s not something that’s normalised in the broader society . . . It comes back to death dialogue and death literacy – how we speak about death in the community. I think trying to shift that culture is important, because sanitization extends to language as well, to how we speak about death. I think it comes from a place of protection and care a lot of the time, but it could be doing more harm than good.
Jack notes that the absence of certain forms of loss and grief on social media skews the public understanding of the frequency, nature and meaning behind certain forms of death. Death is becoming increasingly public in the age of social media: digital eulogies, memorialisation, and legacy-making are now part of everyday digital practices (Abidin, 2018, 2022). While death-related loss dominates social media spaces due to the logic of hashtags, certain types of death are still rendered invisible and absent from the public domain, leaving behind a lingering affective trace (Cumiskey & Hjorth, 2017). This also raises questions about agency, grievability and representation within networked publics, the questions that social media platforms are less likely to deal with.
The Tension Between Digital Connection and Disconnection in Grief-Sharing
The concept of networked publics draws on the recognition that social media accounts ‘are not just about a relationship between the platforms and each individual user, but also about the shared trust between users who cocreate each other both in life and in death’ (Leaver, 2018, p. 44). This dynamic relationship between platforms, users and user communities is a vital part of daily life. The participants in this research recognise social media’s role in grieving: as a tool for connection, education and emotional comfort or distraction. They also understand the significant labour required for digital legacy-making and memorialisation and for taking care of one’s own and others’ mental health during bereavement.
Sam is a young mom who lost a 3-year-old son due to sudden infant death syndrome and has been navigating bereavement online and offline since. Sam notes that social media has helped provide solace and information early in the bereavement; she turned to grief experts and bereaved parent groups in search for more grief-sensitive community and content. Yet, navigating social media as a bereaved person requires work. Sam notes that affordances of social media have been helpful, at times even supportive of her grieving, and yet, at other times, such as holidays and transitionary periods for the generation of her son, social media space becomes triggering:
It’s a balance because social media is such a big part of our lives and there are some beautiful things from it, but also sometimes it can be not helpful. I’m getting better at learning how to use social media more helpfully. But you can get caught up, and look at people’s pictures and then like them, and then get more depressed.
Sam adds that over time she had to learn when and how to navigate social media. In addition to navigating ‘inadvertent algorithmic cruelty’ (Abidin, 2018; Meyer, 2014), created by ‘Daily Memories’, ‘A Year in Review’ and similar functions which would resurface the photos of the deceased loved ones, Sam and other bereaved parents have to navigate relational dynamics with their community during times of intense grief:
For example, during holidays, if I’m feeling a bit tender, I don’t look at people’s stories if they have pictures of their kids and stuff. So that’s the flip side that I’ve had to change my relationship with social media. Because, you know, it’s a way to connect and be part of people’s lives, but that comes at a cost to you. If you’ve experienced grief, it’s a reminder of what you’ve lost. And it’s painful to see sometimes. You know, this year he would have started school. And so, seeing the school photos at the start of the year, I just can’t be on social media in January.
Abidin (2018) notes that many people who are experiencing intense grief simply do not have the mental capacity and resources to plan self-care, yet navigating digital presence during grief requires not only self-care but also skill and discipline in learning when to and how to connect and when to disconnect. Sam suggests,
If I had to give advice, I think one of the main things to reflect on is whether this is helping me, or this is hindering me. Is it helping my grief, or is it hindering it? In those times when it’s not helping, It’s OK to disconnect. But if there are other times when it helps to find quotes or images about grief that you connect with and that’s helpful to you, then yeah, great. And maybe knowing that that fluctuates, it’s not a hard and fast rule.
Sam’s advice to those in grief demonstrates the labour required for navigating the tension between affordances and risks associated with digital connection. For those experiencing grief, this constant tension between privacy and publicness is an additional layer in navigating social contexts and grief. Sam’s account of navigating the need for digital connection and disconnection illustrates how affective disconnection operates. It adds to the work of Kaun (2021) and Syvertsen and Enli (2020) on digital disconnection by emphasising how the affectivity of social media content contributes to disconnection. Beyond digital detox as a tool for self-optimisation and self-regulation, grievers often need to disconnect to manage grief. Social media here becomes a site of belonging and support and simultaneously a site of non-belonging.
Fragmented Mourning: Negotiating Grief, Visibility and Meaning in Digital Spaces
Social media platforms have become spaces for sharing deeply personal stories including the ones of loss, grief and mourning. While digital mourning offers new ways to commemorate loved ones and seek support, for some negotiating networked identity while grieving significant loss becomes too much of a task. Annie, an artist, educator and digital innovator currently grieving the loss of health in the light of a potentially terminal illness, shares the ups and downs of navigating online presence and absence while grieving. For Annie, this included a time of intentional abstinence from social media to process grief:
My grief has been incredibly painful, and annihilating at times, and like I was saying before, these were not the times when I wanted to go near social media. In a sense, although I may have been accessing stuff that resonated with on the Internet. My general memory of my worst time was just to completely stay off it. Although I’d probably from time to time look for a meme or an interview, or I mean I’d go on the Internet, in terms of social media, I would definitely stay away.
Annie further adds that social media operates metaphorically as a ‘hall of mirrors’, distorting perceptions of space, identity, and reality. In the context of grief and loss, entering this ‘hall’ at a time when one’s sense of self and anticipated future are destabilised exacerbates the challenges of navigating grief. This distortion complicates death literacy and grief literacy, as individuals struggle to reconcile their experiences of loss with often curated and performative representations of grief on digital platforms. Furthermore, digital memorialisation, while offering spaces for connection and remembrance, can magnify this disorientation by creating fragmented or idealised versions of mourning that diverge from lived experiences, deepening the complexity of processing and understanding grief in a digitally mediated environment.
According to Breen and colleagues (2022), the death literacy movement (as part of the compassionate communities’ movement) has paved the way for the rise in grief literacy. The concept of grief literacy was first explored by Clark (2003), who argued that the rise of grief knowledge would ‘enable the general public and professionals to identify grief more readily, to seek out relevant information and to adopt appropriate supports and thereby be proactive in avoiding complications from the grieving process such as depression’. For Breen et al. (2022), grief is an embodied response to loss that impacts all facets of life. Like the mobile phone, grief can act as both an emotional vehicle and a companion; yet, as Annie notes above, it can complicate one’s relationships with oneself and others. Social media, according to Annie, further complicates this experience, particularly for those whose grief is less visible or acceptable. Unlike Annie, Alexa finds digital grief spaces incomplete in their orientation towards dark affectivity – a circulation of difficult, heavy or unsettling grief-related stories and emotions that tend to linger, accumulate and shape how people navigate bereavement. Alexa is a grief counsellor, life and death celebrant, and death doula whose experiences of loss and grief were exacerbated after the unexpected death by suicide of her adult son. Similar to Annie, Alexa shares that social media curates a valuable place for memorialisation and connection. Yet, her experience in finding the type of connection she would find valuable was challenging. Alexa is particularly critical of unfacilitated grief support groups on platforms such as Facebook for their predominantly emotionally cathartic function:
For most people, I think, I think the reason people go to social media is because they don’t have to identify themselves, and there’s some sense of anonymity there, and they don’t. They don’t have to protect other people. I get that when you really want to say what you’re feeling, it’s going to upset other people and so you tend not to . . . I tend not to say exactly how I’m feeling all the time because I need to protect other people’s souls as well. But when you get into a group that and I think that’s why social media has been so useful for people, because they can do it without any sense of filter. They just say it how it is. But I think there’s a real danger and staying in that place forever and letting your bereavement identify who you are and define who you are and all that you’re saying . . . I’m not against social media, but I’m very disturbed about the pain that it can continue to cause without people even realizing it is keeping people in the depths of their misery.
Alexa’s engagement with online grief support groups left her feeling unsatisfied due to an absence of relational nuance, a lack of temporal perspective in discussions about grief, and what she described as the absence of ‘meaningful feedback’. While much of the literature emphasises the potential benefits of reading others’ grief narratives – such as fostering connection and moderating loneliness (Cook, 2025) – Alexa’s experience underscores a contrasting perspective. She highlights the loneliness she encountered when faced with fragmented stories centred only on grief experiences. This fragmentation, both in personal narratives and the broader identities of those sharing on social media, introduces additional tensions for the bereaved. This phenomenon we frame here as ‘dark grief content’ has been picked up by another of the participants, a national grief and loss support hub lead, Melanie:
There are people in the social media space who do a lot of grief content, but it’s not positioned in a positive light. What I mean by that is that there’s no hope attached to it. Grieving people want to be validated and we know that grief is not all sunshine and rainbows. But the idea with grief is (that one needs to) integrate it and to grow as a human being, to build resilience and learn new ways of approaching life after you’ve lost someone or something significant. But some social media platforms are perpetuating negativity by not even mentioning that there is life after loss. And I’m not saying you have to make it sunshine and rainbows. We certainly don’t. We focus a lot on normalising grief and part of that is saying yes you can have a life after loss. It is possible. That’s the message that we’re trying to convey.
Melanie’s critique highlights a gap in grief literacy (Breen et al., 2022) on social media platforms, where narratives may lack balance. The concept of ‘dark grief content’ can be visible in online material about grief that lacks a constructive narrative, instead narrating solely the painful aspects without presenting the possibility of integration and life after loss. Dark affectivity here is visible in the emotional weight that circulates in grief-related content online that offers no possibility for growth, integration or hope. By emphasising integration, Melanie refers to a widely supported therapeutic approach where individuals learn to adapt to life after loss, weaving the memory of the deceased or the significance of the loss into a new identity, a new type of continuing bond with the deceased and ultimately a different future.
The Tapestries of Grief Literacies: Discussion of Disconnecting and Non-Sharing as Grief Work
As outlined in our discussion of participants’ motivations for non-sharing, there are three interlinked themes: (a) less visible forms of grief, (b) the tension between digital connection and disconnection in grief-sharing, and (c) fragmented mourning. Across participants’ accounts, digital grieving emerges as an ongoing negotiation between visibility, responsibility, and care within platformed environments. As Tom’s and Jessica’s experiences show, certain losses, such as those linked to suicide, substance use or family estrangement, remain algorithmically and socially unacknowledged (Lemos Dekker, 2023; Schock et al., 2025). Their narratives illustrate how users navigate what Abidin (2018) calls ‘grief policing’, enacted both through platform moderation and through self-regulation rooted in stigma, safety and ethical concern. For Tom, public mourning on social media involved learning to communicate safely and responsibly within suicide prevention discourse, transforming personal loss into a form of digital literacy and advocacy. For Jessica, boundaries around disclosure reveal how platform cultures of transparency collide with the relational constraints of mourning. Together, these accounts highlight how platform affordances and cultural scripts of grievability (Butler, 2016) shape who and what can be mourned online, while making visible the invisible labour required to sustain responsible digital mourning.
The experiences of Sam, Annie, Alexa and Melanie further reveal the tension between connection and disconnection as users alternate between seeking comfort and protecting themselves from algorithmic exposure. For Sam, negotiating ‘inadvertent algorithmic cruelty’ (Abidin, 2018; Meyer, 2014) involved developing strategies of selective engagement – turning disconnection into an act of care rather than avoidance. Annie’s metaphor of social media as a ‘hall of mirrors’ (Leaver, 2018) underscores how digital infrastructures mediate perception, amplifying distortion in moments of grief. Alexa’s and Melanie’s critiques of ‘dark grief content’ expose how platform logics prioritise affective intensity over integration or meaning-making, revealing a gap in grief literacy (Breen et al., 2022). Together, these narratives suggest that digital mourning is not simply a form of expression but an ongoing affective and ethical labour – a negotiation between platform affordances, algorithmic visibility, and the relational ethics of sharing and non-sharing. In this sense, digital grief practices both reproduce and contest the architectures of visibility that structure emotional life in networked publics.
While the sharing of death and loss on social media has become mundane, this doesn’t mean everyone – as our participants have highlighted – shares. Recent research by Cook (2025) and Navon and Noy (2023) suggests that new media and digital mourning challenge sequestration of the dead and dying and support reintegration of grief into the everyday – a much-needed turn towards loss as a part of life. Comparably, the recent scoping review by Liang et al. (2025) determined that social media does play an important role in managing grief. However, Liang et al. (2025) note a significant gap in understanding how social media supports or hinders the grief process and the differences in social media engagement among people facing socially acknowledged versus stigmatised losses. Our research responds to this by noting that scholarship must move beyond visible content to a fuller account of restraint, withholding and non-sharing. Only by attending to both the seen and the unseen dynamics of digital mourning can interventions, platform design and grief literacy be meaningfully informed. Our findings highlight a skewed picture of loss and grief currently circulating on social media due to social stigma and platforms’ logic. While grief has now become more visible and engaged with on social media, our participants’ narratives highlight that it is mainly the less complicated forms of loss and grief that dominate these networked publics, creating uneven public registers for grief literacy. Whether our participants choose to disconnect, not share or carefully curate their social media content, there is relational, ethical and affective work in the background that often goes unseen. The disconnection our participants illuminate is more than a practice of digital wellbeing, explored by Van Bruyssel et al. (2024). In this article, we suggest the disconnection, much like the non-share, becomes a site of self-preservation and care and an ongoing digital mourning practice. Disconnecting from technology is never just about leaving a device or platform; it also means stepping away from the social relations, responsibilities and expectations tied to them (Van Bruyssel et al., 2024). In this sense, disconnection both enables new (re)connections and reveals how deeply our digital lives are entangled with others. Yet, for grievers, this entanglement is complicated by grief as an embodied, relational experience. While social media for many presents a vital source of bereavement support (Liang et al., 2025), it becomes another tension to be managed for those with more complicated losses. In this article, rather than offering definitive insights or conclusions, we invite readers to attune carefully to the questions that emerged through our participants’ experiences: How do we inhabit digital grieving spaces when our losses are stigmatised or unacknowledged? How do we engage with online mourning when our grief remains invisible within public registers of loss? And how do we withdraw – or stay connected – when the very communities that sustain us also become sites of grief?
Multiple challenges arise from the growing amount of ‘data of the dead’, as the data legacies and custodianship of people’s posthumous digital lives steadily expand. There are the complexities of copyright, intellectual and data property, governance and sovereignty issues – only deepening with the dominance of digital platforms and emerging data, computation and AI infrastructures. As Kasket (2019, 2020) and Kneese (2023a, 2023b) note, there is a deep tension between the way data of the dead are conceived of in terms of social media propriety platforms and how users think of it – not to mention the environmental dimensions of all these data. For the bereaved, this only adds to the labour required for navigating the tension between affordances and risks associated with digital connection.
Conclusion: Grief and Everyday Social Media Practices
As propriety platforms rapidly change in accordance with political turns (see how Meta went MAGA when Trump was elected president again), the sharing on these platforms can have many unintended consequences. We need to start to rethink how we imagine social media as grief spaces and the importance of recognising the vital role of not sharing as crucial, if not more so, in contemporary tapestries of social media practices. These tapestries take various turns and folds; some threads are seen, and others are unseen but felt. As our participants’ experiences have highlighted, we need frameworks that acknowledge disconnection and non-sharing as crucial in care and grief work. Grief work is hard, and while there are grief educators and influencers that seek to build grief literacy, there is a wide spectrum of understandings of grief across social media that highlight the need for more compassionate, nuanced and relational understandings of grief and mourning.
As we move forward into future trajectories of social media practice, we need to recognise the importance of non-sharing, and uneven picture of social reality this creates, in a world seemingly dominated by sharing. Much like Kate Crawford’s (2009) call to attention to think about listening as an active part of online participation, so too, the quiet activism of the non-share suggests futures in which material rituals and meaning have not been superseded by the digital and where some emotions and feelings need to remain offline. By highlighting the interplay between visibility and withholding, we aim to contribute to a deeper understanding of how mourning moves across online and offline spaces as reflections of contemporary social and cultural frameworks of loss. Moreover, as we move towards futures where the environmental damage of data storage starts to become an important factor in our decision processes, maybe the non-sharing is a sustainable tactic.
In this article, we have sought to understand the important role of non-sharing and affective disconnection as a crucial part of everyday social media practice and as a reflection of broader uneven grief literacies. By exploring some of our participants’ motivations, we have sought to bring insight into this under-explored field. As proprietary platforms become more dynamic and contingent on politics, such as witnessed on Meta and X, we need to find ways to research non-sharing, disconnection and the tensions between them as self-preservation and self-care strategies.
Footnotes
Ethical considerations
The study was approved by the Human Research Ethics Committee of RMIT University (ID: 26786).
Author contributions
L.H. conceptualised and led the overall project. All authors were involved in the interviewing and data analysis process. All authors contributed to the conceptualisation and write-up of this manuscript and approved its final version.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by the Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (Project: The Mourning After: Grief, witnessing and mobile media practices – ID: FT220100552).
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Data availability statement
The data that support the findings of this study are available on reasonable request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available due to their containing information that could compromise the privacy of research participants.