When someone dies, their Facebook account doesn’t disappear. Unless specific steps have been taken, it stays up — visible to friends, appearing in search results, sometimes still generating notifications. For families, this can be distressing in ways that are hard to predict. A birthday reminder sent to a grief group. A memory post surfacing a year later. A stranger sending a message to an account that can no longer reply.
Facebook has two options for what happens to an account after death: memorialisation and permanent deletion. Instagram, owned by the same company, follows a similar but slightly different process. Knowing which option is right for you — and setting it up in advance — takes less than five minutes and saves your family a painful administrative task at the worst possible time.
This article explains exactly what each option involves, how your family can request it if you haven’t set things up in advance, and what a Legacy Contact can and cannot do on your behalf.
What happens to a Facebook account when someone dies
By default, nothing happens immediately. Facebook has no automatic mechanism to detect that a user has died. The account continues to exist, and Facebook’s systems may continue to suggest the person to others, show their profile in search results, or surface their old posts as memories.
This changes only when someone notifies Facebook — either by requesting memorialisation or by requesting permanent deletion of the account. Facebook will ask for proof of death (a death certificate or obituary) and, in some cases, proof of the relationship between the person making the request and the deceased.
Memorialisation — what it means
When an account is memorialised, the word “Remembering” appears above the person’s name on their profile. The account is frozen — no new friend requests, no login attempts, no algorithmic surfacing of the profile to people who didn’t already know them.
Memorialised accounts cannot be logged into by anyone — including the Legacy Contact. What a Legacy Contact can do is limited but meaningful: they can write and pin a tribute post, respond to new friend requests from people who knew the person, and update the cover photo. They cannot read private messages, make posts as the person, or see content the account owner hadn’t shared with them previously.
Setting up a Legacy Contact
A Legacy Contact is the person Facebook allows to manage certain aspects of your memorialised account. You can set one up now in under two minutes.
To set up a Legacy Contact: go to Settings → Memorialisation Settings → Legacy Contact. You can choose any Facebook friend, and Facebook will send them a notification letting them know they’ve been chosen.
You can also use this same settings page to request that your account be permanently deleted after death instead of memorialised.
What about Instagram?
Instagram is owned by Meta (the same company as Facebook) but operates a separate memorialisation process. There is no Legacy Contact equivalent on Instagram — only two options: memorialisation or removal.
To request either, a family member or close friend must submit a special form on Instagram’s Help Centre. They’ll need to provide proof of death and, for removal requests, proof of their relationship to the deceased. Instagram reviews these requests manually, which means the process can take days or weeks.
What to do right now
- Go to Facebook Settings → Memorialisation Settings and either set a Legacy Contact or choose account deletion after death
- Tell at least one person what you’ve decided and where to find your written wishes
- Note your Instagram preference in a document stored with your will — memorialise or remove
- Consider doing the same for other social platforms you use regularly (Twitter/X, LinkedIn, TikTok)
None of this takes more than twenty minutes. Done once and reviewed occasionally, it removes a significant source of stress from your family’s plate at an already difficult time.