Since World War I, more than 119,000 Canadians have died while serving their country. Those deaths are now being memorialized in 140 characters or less.
Earlier this morning, at 11:11 a.m. ET, the Twitter account @wearethedead started tweeting out the names of Canadian Forces members who have fallen in the line of duty. The account will post one name per hour, every day, for about the next 13 years, depending on how many more names are added to the list moving forward.
The Twitter account was created by the Ottawa Citizen newspaper, which was inspired by the famous WWI poem “In Flanders Fields.”
“Through this Twitter account, and through more extensive use of social media down the line, we hope to make the act of keeping faith a more subtle, but in many ways more permanent feature, of the lives of Canadians,” said managing editor Andrew Potter in an article on the newspaper’s website.
The simple tweets will include the “name, rank, unit, age, and date and location of death” of each soldier, reported the Citizen. They will be chosen at random using a Twitter bot.
This was the name of the first soldier remembered at 11:11 a.m. today:
“Pvt. Bernard Leonard Mcfadden (Essex Scottish Regiment, R.C.I.C.). Aug. 27, 1944.”
Glen McGregor, one of the Citizen reporters behind the idea, has been experimenting with Twitter bot for quite some time. In the beginning, the idea was to tweet out all the names on Remembrance Day (Nov. 11), a Canadian holiday set aside to remember those who have died in the line of duty since World War I. That idea was quickly scratched because “tweeting the entire list over a week or month would flood people’s Twitter feeds and probably get us banned for excessive posting,” McGregor wrote in a blog post.
@wearethedead is like a modern day cemetery, serving as a permanent record honoring the sacrifice these soldiers made.
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