All of us now have a number of social media accounts, email addresses, and a few bank account. Everything is needed for a connected life in the material world. But what happens to your account after your death? Did you ever imagine what happens to your social media account after your reign?
What over 2.4 billion monthly active users, Facebook is the most popular social network on the planet. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook is the largest social network with 1.66 billion people log onto Facebook every day. Facebooks’ most common age demographic is from 25 to 34. Five new profiles are created every second. Researchers estimated that approximately 8000 users die every day. So, within the next fifty years, Facebook is like a place for dead than the living. The dead could outnumber the living on Facebook. In 2012, after eight years the platform launched, 30 million users had died.
Facebook has a solution to memorialize accounts. The memorialized accounts help people to remember and celebrate those who’ve passed away. There are two options to handle your social account after your life. You can choose a legacy contact to look after your memorialized account or you can permanently delete your account from Facebook. Memorialized accounts are a place for friends and family to gather and share memories after a person has passed away. You can easily identify by the word Remembering will be shown next to the person’s name on their profile. Friends can share memories on the memorialized timeline depending on the privacy settings of that account. The content that the person shared like photos, posts, etc. stays on Facebook and is visible on Facebook to the audience it was shared with. But no one can log into a memorialized account.
A legacy contact is someone you choose to look after your account if it’s memorialized. A legacy contact can accept friend requests on behalf of a memorialized account, pin a tribute post to the profile and change the profile picture and cover photo. If the memorialized account has an area for tributes, a legacy contact will be able to decide who can see and who can post tributes.
Deleting your account
You can choose to have your account permanently deleted when you pass away. When someone informs the matter to Facebook, all of your messages, photos, posts, comments, reactions, and info will be immediately and permanently removed from Facebook.
To do it, on top right of the Facebook account, click the down arrow, then click Settings>Memorialization settings>Edit. You can see Your Legacy Contact. You can choose a friend to add to look after your account after you pass away.
If you don’t want a Facebook account after you pass away, you can delete it permanently after your death. Click Request that your account is deleted after you pass away. In the Delete your account in the future? box click Delete after death. You can refer to this Facebook help page about the legacy accounts.
