When the Container Collapses: Digital Mourning Spaces, Platform Loss, and the Politics of Grief

This study examines how individuals emotionally experience, interpret, and adapt to the loss of digital mourning spaces — and how they make meaning of what those spaces held in their grieving practices. Drawing on narrative inquiry with autoethnographic grounding, it analyzes three primary sources: the researcher's own reflexive narrative of digital grief container loss, and semi-structured interviews with two participants who experienced the collapse of digital mourning spaces following the deaths of loved ones. The study argues that platform loss constitutes a form of secondary trauma — a structurally produced second rupture in the grieving process that is largely unrecognized, inadequately supported, and unevenly distributed across communities. It introduces the concept of the grief container to name the phenomenon at the heart of all three accounts: a space that holds, organizes, and stabilizes mourning, whose collapse produces displacement, disorientation, and compounded grief. Drawing on frameworks from infrastructure theory, care ethics, archival studies, and critical platform studies, the study positions digital platforms as grief infrastructure without accountability — and argues that the grief most vulnerable to platform erasure follows the same lines of inequality that structure platform treatment of living users. Implications for platform design, grief support practice, and future research are discussed.Keywords: digital grief, platform loss, grief infrastructure, secondary loss, autoethnography, algorithmic erasure, care work, memory