The grieving process after a loved one passes is a difficult time for everyone. Accessing a loved one’s social media account after they have passed away can be difficult, and seeing a deceased loved one’s social media account in your feed can needlessly prolong the grieving process. At TuckerAllen, we can help you save passwords to your social media accounts to include with your estate documents, but you can also take steps today to ensure your social media accounts can easily be removed or accessed after you pass away. In addition, if you are a grieving close friend or family member, you can work with social media websites to remove deceased users’ accounts. More information is provided below.
Account Deletion and In-Memoriam Designation
Social media websites offer various options for your account after you have passed away, including legacy contact support, in-memoriam designation, and account deletion.
Facebook offers legacy contact support, in which a user can designate a contact to manage the user’s Facebook account after the user has passed away. Legacy contacts can post a final pinned message, update your profile picture, and request the removal of your account.
Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn also allow an in-memoriam designation to the deceased users’ accounts. This feature adds the text “in-memoriam” or “remembering” to a user’s profile. The profile can no longer create posts, and users can no longer add the account, but the profile will stay active with an in-memoriam designation until it is deleted via request.
All the below social media websites also offer account deletion for deceased members’ accounts, but only Twitter and Facebook allow an incapacitated user’s account to be deleted.
Please see the links below for detailed information regarding social media accounts.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/help/991335594313139
Legacy Contact: https://www.facebook.com/help/1070665206293088/?helpref=related_articles
Incapacitated Account Deletion: https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/228813257197480
Instagram: https://help.instagram.com/231764660354188
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a1380121/deceased-linkedin-member?lang=en
Spotify Codes: https://www.spotifycodes.com/#faq
NOTE: Spotify does not offer a way to memorialize accounts but allows users to save and memorialize playlists through Spotify Codes easily. Please see the link above for more information.
In the Event of Incapacity
It is important to save the passwords to your most important digital assets before you pass away. Including passwords in your estate planning documents can help ease the burden of collecting digital account information and prevent lengthy phone calls or back-and-forth email correspondences with social media corporations in the event of your incapacity.
Most social media websites hesitate to give out account passwords, and others refuse to provide account passwords under any circumstances. Only Twitter and Facebook allow a power of attorney to request account deletion when a user is incapacitated, and none of the companies listed in this article allow powers of attorney to access or post on another user’s account.
If you want your loved ones to be able to access photographs, posts, or other aspects of your social media accounts, you will need to give them passwords to your accounts. When you draft a will or trust with TuckerAllen, we provide a fillable digital asset form to record passwords and other important information required to access your social media accounts. This digital asset form is attached to your trust or will, making it a convenient reference for anybody administering your estate.