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Social Media Legacy Accounts Will Outnumber the Living

By Laura Tucker
Social Media Legacy Accounts Featured

We put a lot into our social media accounts; we carefully cultivate them and load them up with everything that’s important to us. The thought of losing that interactive “journal” is heartbreaking. It’s a relief, then, to learn that some outlets allow you to set it up so that someone else can manage your account after you pass away. But for how long can we continue to allow social media legacy accounts?

What Happens to Your Account When You Are Gone?

Most of the major social media companies allow you to designate someone as a contact, someone who can contact the company after you pass away to let them know and many your account. This includes Facebook and Instagram. Google, TikTok, and X don’t have a policy, and you’ll need to set something up on your own if you want your account to be a memorial to you.

If you’re on Facebook, you can appoint a “Legacy Contact.” This should be someone trusted whom you don’t mind seeing any of your secrets behind the scenes. After you pass away, they’ll take over and can respond to friend requests, pin posts, and update your profile and cover photos. They can’t remove friends, however, or get access to your messages. It will say “Remembering” next to your user name.

Social Media Legacy Account Facebook
Image source: Unsplash

Tip: learn how to make Facebook private.

On Instagram, it will also say “Remembering” next to your user name, but you cannot appoint a Legacy Contact. Your trusted person will need to contact Instagram with the documentation that you have passed away to start overseeing your account.

And again, X, TikTok, and Google/YouTube don’t have any process at all. In fact, X, as Twitter, used to allow inactive accounts to just sit. Then last year, several accounts with no activity were purged, with no warning. The best advice with X and the other two is to give a trusted person your login details or supply a death certificate if you want the account closed.

Deceased and Legacy Accounts May Outnumber Active Accounts

ExpressVPN has done the research and found that these social media legacy accounts, as well as those abandoned by a deceased person, will someday outnumber the number of living people. Some refer to these accounts as “digital graveyards.”

Social Media Legacy Account Tiktok
Image source: Unsplash

The company examined Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok, particularly in the United States, but also the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, and Portugal. The projection is that there will be 659 million deceased/legacy accounts by the year 2100, which is nearly double the U.S. population. However, with those rising numbers, it’s altogether possible that social media companies will begin to change their policies.

Planning for the Future

Everyone who has an account will leave it behind eventually. Either it will be abandoned, or they will have a trusted person controlling it. And for many of us, that’s several accounts. I have a Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, and Google account, among others. When I pass away, which will most assuredly be before 2100, I’ll leave all those accounts behind.

It’s up to you how you want to handle your accounts, whether you want to just leave it abandoned, leave someone watching over your account, or look into options to have it deleted after you pass away. At least you can rest assured that you won’t be alone after you’re gone – you’ll be among many.

Just want to change your Facebook username? We can show you how.

Image credit: Unsplash

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Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

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