Social media continues to be a pioneer of new social trends and reshaping society through its ability to connect individuals across cultures and geographies. One of the latest trends involves the process of mourning through social media.

University of Washington recently covered Nina Cesare and Jennifer Branstad‘s new research, presented for the first time at this summer’s annual sociology meetings, that finds that people who use Twitter to mourn a death do so more publicly than compared to other social media sites, like Facebook, where mourning is more private. They explain,

“While posts about death on Facebook, for example, tend to be more personal and involve people who knew the deceased … Twitter users may not know the dead person, tend to tweet both personal and general comments about the deceased, and sometimes tie the death to broader social issues — for example, mental illness or suicide.”

The researchers describe this change as an opening up of the public conversation surrounding death and mourning and an expansion of the “inner circle” that typically mourns the death of a loved one. Cesare explains,

“…I think the ability of Twitter to open the mourning community outside of the intimate sphere is a big contribution, and creating this space where people can come together and talk about death is something new.”