When someone dies, YOU are the one that immediately needs to deal with their social media

Let the Palace intrigue begin!<br><br>There's a weird trend on Reddit to immediately memorialize the dead family member's accounts, demand that their account be deleted *RIGHT NOW*, and if you don't do it NOW then you're disrespecting their memory. That's a bunch of bullshit, and if you listen to them, you'll constantly second guess yourself every time someone dies because you have no good place to go to for information.<br><br>Why would you be the one doing this? Because the *only* person that can access a deceased person's accounts are someone with their login credentials. That person is usually you. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit, StackOverflow, *NONE* of these platforms will do anything without access to the account first, and they make it purposely obfuscating and difficult to get access without the login credentials. They recommend you "contact legal counsel" to get a court order, which is really just a nice way of saying, "Fuck off. You'll die of old age before we do anything."<br><br>You can't let a Redditor decide what to do with their accounts because 1. They don't have access to their accounts, and 2. They don't know what the deceased would have wanted.<br><br>You need to find out the deceased persons login credentials. No, you can't ask tech companies for them. No, you can't go to the local police station and ask them to get the credentials for you. No, you can't ask a technician to crack them. There are nomagical places you can go to get someone's login credentials. You'll need to look through their private papers, personal notes, their phone, their computer, and their desk drawers. If you're having trouble logging in with the credentials you've found, you may need to factory reset their phone or computer.<br><br>Use these credentials to log into the account. Usually when you do this, the tech company will immediately send an email to the account owner's email address, which you won't have the login credentials for. Don't worry, just keep trying until you can get *only* that single account to stop sending you confirmation emails. If you're having trouble logging into their email, follow the same instructions above to find their email's login credentials.<br><br>Once you get into the account, take a *SCREENSHOT* of your access to that account. Go ahead and change the account password so that nobody else will access the account. Then go to the tech company's website and follow their instructions to get the account deleted or memorialized.<br><br>If you don't want to do this, you don't have to! Just make sure you change the password so that nobody else will access the account, and let it rot in limbo to rot in perpetuity.<br><br>Why would you go through all this trouble? Well, it's not for the deceased. They're dead. But the rest of you still need to resolve any outstanding issues the deceased has left behind. This is where the historical record comes into play. Have you ever tried going through old emails looking for some old receipts? Old texts looking for addresses? Old Facebook messages looking for someone's name? It's hard! And what if you need to hire a lawyer? Then you're really fucked. Tech companies will deliberately make it as difficult as possible to access historical records so that you'll just give up. But that historical record is the only thing that proves that the deceased owes people money, that they bought something from someone, or that they went to an event. That historical record is the only thing that proves that you have been paying your taxes, paying your bills, owning your property, and treating your friends and family right. Without that information, you *WILL* lose money. You *WILL* lose property. And you *WILL* lose relationships. If you don't want to gut through all of the Palace intrigue on Reddit, then you're better off doing it yourself.<br><br>The alternative is to ask the tech companies to delete the accounts. The tech companies won't do shit. They'll just say they're sorry for your loss, and that the only thing they can do is lock the account down. They'll pretend they're doing this out of respect for the deceased, but in reality, it's because they want to keep collecting your data.<br><br>If someone dies, you're the only person that can access their social media without going into a years long lawsuit to get access. Don't be fooled by all the gaslighting on Reddit that you need to hire a lawyer just to delete an account.