'Grief Policing' After Celebrity Deaths

Guest: Katie Gach, PhD Student and Social Computing Researcher, ATLAS Institute, University of Colorado Boulder In 2017, Americans mourned the deaths of celebrities including, Mary Tyler Moore, Tom Petty, Jerry Lewis, Roger Moore, Chris Cornell and Chuck Berry. And since it was 2017, a lot of that mourning was done online—on Facebook, Twitter, in the comments of news articles. If you’ve ever posted a comment on a public website, you know that backlash to what you say can come swiftly and from anyone, anywhere. Researchers at the University of Colorado have looked into a very particular kind of backlash after celebrity deaths known as “grief policing.” Their findings say a lot about how the internet is changing grief.