What happens to my Facebook and Instagram accounts when I die?
Facebook has a self-service Legacy Contact feature, limited to one person. Once your profile is memorialized, per Meta's own help pages, that legacy contact can: "Write a pinned post for your profile," "Update your profile picture and cover photo," "Request the removal of your account," and "Download a copy of what you've shared on Facebook." Source They explicitly cannot: "Log into your account. Read your messages. Remove any of your friends or make new friend requests." Source
Memorialization itself (which can happen with or without a legacy contact, once Facebook is notified of the death) changes the account this way: "The word Remembering will be shown next to the person's name on their profile," "No one can log into a memorialized account," and "Content the person shared (ex: photos, posts) stays on Facebook and is visible to the audience it was shared with." A companion page adds: "In most cases, once an account is memorialized, content can't be removed from it." Source and Source
So the honest summary for Facebook: a legacy contact can curate the memorial and even get the whole account deleted, but cannot read your messages or ever log in as you, and most content becomes frozen in place rather than editable.
What we could not verify: Instagram-specific mechanics. Instagram's own help center is fully
JavaScript-rendered and blocked every automated fetch attempt in this research pass (both direct
curl with a browser user-agent and WebFetch returned nav-only shells with no article text). I
could not confirm from Instagram's own page whether it offers an in-app Legacy Contact assignment
the way Facebook does, versus only a memorialization request form. Do not publish a specific claim
about Instagram's mechanics without a fresh, successful fetch of Instagram's own help article.
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