My memo:
“Social media lasting more than 100 years. Keeping a record of one person’s whole life.”
I wrote it as a thought, not a worry. But the more I looked into it, the more it turned into a small to-do list.
Short answer: it depends on the platform, and on what you set up ahead of time. Facebook and Instagram can memorialize an account, with “Remembering” next to the name and no one able to log in, or delete it if you chose that. Google’s Inactive Account Manager lets you pick up to 10 people to notify or share data with, and Google may delete accounts that have been inactive for at least two years.
A diary nobody locks
Think about everything a person posts over a lifetime. Meals. Trips. Birthdays. Bad jokes. A blurry sunset, a few hundred times.
Our grandparents left a box of photos, maybe a few letters. We’re going to leave decades of daily notes. Most of them public, or at least visible to someone.
Me? I keep my mother’s prayer beads. She held them for years, bowing and praying. There are no words on them, no dates. Still, it’s a record.
It’s the biggest diary humans have ever kept. And nobody really decided to keep it. It just piled up.
How many of us are in there?
In 2019, two researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute, Carl Öhman and David Watson, did some math about Facebook.
Their projection: if no new users joined after 2018, at least 1.4 billion Facebook users would die before 2100, and the dead could outnumber the living by about 2070. If Facebook kept growing at about 13% a year, the total could reach 4.9 billion.
Öhman was careful about how to read this: “The results should be interpreted not as a prediction of the future, but as a commentary on the current development…”
Watson put it in a way that stuck with me: “Never before in history has such a vast archive of human behaviour and culture been assembled in one place.”
That’s basically my memo, said by an Oxford researcher with better grammar.
What happens to your social media when you die?
I wanted to know what the platforms actually do. So I read their help pages. Here’s what they say, as of October 2026. (Policies change. Check the links before you rely on any of this.)
What happens to your Facebook account when you die?
When Facebook learns someone has died, the account can be memorialized. The word “Remembering” shows next to the person’s name. What they shared stays visible to the people it was shared with. No one can log in.
You can pick a “legacy contact” ahead of time, a Facebook friend, someone who can manage some things on a memorialized account. According to Facebook, they can’t read your messages or edit your past posts. You can also choose to have your account deleted after death instead.
What happens to your Instagram account when you die?
Similar. Memorialized profiles show “Remembering.” No one can log in. Posts stay visible to the audience they were shared with. Memorialized profiles don’t show up in places like Explore. Instagram also offers a “Delete After Death” option. And Instagram now has legacy contacts too. They can change the profile picture and manage tags, but they can’t post, send messages, or read your messages.
What happens to your Google account when you die?
Google has something called the Inactive Account Manager. You can decide what happens if your account goes unused for a while, and pick up to 10 people to notify or share data with. You choose how long Google waits, and you can tell it to delete the account afterward. Family can also ask Google to close a deceased person’s account, but Google won’t hand over passwords. Separately, Google says it may delete accounts that have been inactive for at least two years.
So the 100-year idea in my memo isn’t guaranteed. Some accounts get memorialized. Some get deleted. Some just sit, until a policy says otherwise.
The record and the person
Here’s what I keep thinking about.
A feed is a record of a life. But it’s an edited one. We post the trip, not the flight delay. The dinner, not the dishes.
So if my feed outlives me, it’ll tell a story. A true story, mostly. Just with the boring parts cut out. Like a movie trailer for a life.
I don’t think that’s bad. Every record is edited. Letters were edited. Photo albums only had the good shots.
But it’s worth knowing that’s what we’re leaving.
What I’m looking at now
Not advice. Just what reading these pages made me want to check.
- Do I have a legacy contact set up anywhere?
- Have I looked at the Inactive Account Manager?
- Would I want a memorial page, or deletion?
- Is there anything up there I’d want gone?
I haven’t set up any of these yet. Now I’m going to check.
This blog
This blog is part of it too. Every post goes into the same big archive, maybe for a long time.
This one included.