Painful Facebook Memorial Must Come Down: Judge

A memorial Facebook page will have to come down, says a Brazil judge, because it's causing too much pain to its subject's mother. The judge has twice ordered Facebook to remove the page following a lawsuit by the mother of a 24-year-old journalist who died after surgery, the BBC reports. Now, the judge says Facebook, which has a Sao Paulo office, has 48 hours to take action or face imprisonment.

Mother Dolores Pereira Coutinho spent months trying to remove Juliana Ribeiro Campos' profile herself, but she was unsuccessful. Finally, Facebook ended public access to the page, but friends remained able to post on Campos' wall. "This 'wailing wall' just makes me suffer too much," Coutinho says. "On Christmas Eve, many of her 200 friends posted pictures they had taken with her and recalled their memories ... I cried for days." The judge said converting the profile into a memorial violated "the right of personal dignity and inflicted great suffering on the mother, due to the premature death of her only child." (More Facebook stories.)