What Happens To Your Life On Social Media After You Die?

While there's no definitive answer to what happens to us when we die, Dan Shaffer at WebpageFX put together a visual guide to social media life after death. While Twitter will start deleting accounts after six months of inactivity, most other social networks won't touch your profile unless specifically asked by a family member or an agent of law enforcement.

Different sites require various forms of identification and proof of death to delete a profile, but Facebook allows you to turn a lost loved one's profile into a memorial page. The memorialized timeline is accessible and searchable only to friends, who can still post and look at pictures.

mashable.com

The profile won't trigger birthday reminders, nor will it appear in "People You May Know" prompts, so friends will only see it on their own accord. Facebook won't delete profiles on its own, though, which raises another interesting question: When will the profiles of dead Facebook users outnumber those of the living?

Based on research by XKCD, it’s estimated that Facebook’s deceased users would outnumber the living by 2065 — and the entire site would be deserted sometime around 2100. Yet if Facebook keeps growing, and memorialized accounts are never removed, there will still be a crossover — sometime around 2130.