Friends declare Facebook user 'dead' in social media prank
Posted By KATE STANTON, UPI.com   |   Jan. 7, 2013 at 10:05 AM
Maine's Rusty Foster, 36, found out the hard way that it's
pretty easy to fake a person's death on Facebook. As a prank,
Foster's friends falsely reported him dead last week via
Facebook's "Memorialization Request" page, which only requires
the "deceased" person's name, email and a link to an obituary
for the social media site to declare someone dead and block
access to their account. Foster's friends used the real obituary
of a different person with a similar name to trick Facebook into
thinking he had died.  When Buzzfeed's Katie Notopoulos got word
of the incident, she used the same tactic to kill off one of her
coworkers, the very much alive Buzzfeed FWD editor John Herrman,
with the obituary of "John Arthur Herrmann," a 74-year-old
Nebraskan who died in June.  Facebook deactivated Herrman's
account until about an hour after he filled out a special form.
When Buzzfeed asked why it wa