When Facebook users in Argentina logged on to the social network Wednesday, they may have noticed that something had disappeared — their friends' profile pictures went missing.
But unlike previous Facebook mishaps, such as the recent spamming of private messages to users in America, these profile updates were no mistake. Tens of thousands of Facebook users in the South American nation took down their pictures to commemorate the estimated 30,000 people who were disappeared during the country's Dirty War.
"No profile picture through March 24," the participating Argentine users posted as their status update. The military junta that presided over the Dirty War against suspected leftists came to power via a coup d'etat on that date in 1976.
"In memory of the disappeared of the Argentine military dictatorship, whose own faces were seized by intolerance and totalitarianism. I invite you to do the same. No profile photo. Never again," the updates went on, finishing off with an allusion to the title phrase of Argentina's 1984 CONADEP National Commission on the Disappeared.
Indeed, many of the users decided to dedicate their blank profile picture spaces to an inscription that read "Nunca Mas" — Spanish for "Never Again."
Facebook was unable to quantify the number of users in Argentina who had taken down their photos to join the campaign, but more than 36,000 Facebook users had signed up for the virtual event "Photoless for the Missing" by day's end.
For the Facebook event organizer, the social network was a natural forum to utilize for social activism.
"This was a simple way to maintain a living memory," said Matias Raul Rodriguez, a 29-year old Buenos Aires-based activist. "Today, the internet is a place for social participation, right alongside rallies. But the virtual world is real, and many of us spend hours of our daily life here. Therefore, you can protest here too."
The campaign is not without precedent. Social media was embraced by activists during the protests after the contested 2009 presidential election in Iran, when users of Facebook and Twitter made their profile photos green — the color of the Iranian opposition.
"You can draw a straight a line from something like the painting of a mural in the Bronx for a missing friend to what you now see on Facebook," said Sree Sreenivasan, a professor of social media at the Columbia School of Journalism.