October 2025 Bridging Research and Practice

When Queen Elizabeth died in September 2022 at the age of 96, the longest reign of a British monarch in history came to an end. Though government officials had prepared for her death and quickly enacted the plan, Operation London Bridge , the world mourned her death. This study examines posts made in response to the posts on the official X (Twitter) social media platform at the royal family’s handle, @RoyalFamily.

Uwalaka utilized Netlytic, a social media analyzing platform to gather 22,350 posts on X from October 21 to December 15. Since the Queen died on September 8, the gathered posts would seemingly represent a wider range of long-term impacts rather than the simple declarations of “So sorry” or “RIP QE2” that would have populated the site in the early hours and days after the Queen’s death. This study categorized the condolence messages into four main groups according to whether the social media user was expressing condolences, celebrating the Queen’s life and legacy, criticizing policies of racism and colonialism, or honoring the role of the monarchy. This led to the author’s characterization of these social media users as “grievers, lauders, accusers, and defenders” (p. 1). 

In a striking use of social media analytics, the author also uses network analytics to examine how various collections of social media users “talk” to each other via the platform. While the analysis shows interesting correlations between social media communication and human conversation, clinicians readily see the fallacy in assuming that they are the same thing. Ongoing research will need to examine how social media connections provide support to people in bereavement and how that compares to the support that is available through presence, human touch, acts of practical service (such as a “casserole caravan,” and vocal conversation.

This is a fascinating study examining the utilization of social media for collective (and the author’s word, “connective” mourning). As more grieving individuals utilize social media for a part of their mourning practices, it behooves caregiving professionals and volunteers to better understand these practices. Like all articles in the journals Death Studies and Omega , the full study is available for free to members of the Association for Death Education & Counseling at www.adec.org .