A former detective who secured convictions for the murder of Stephen Lawrence has called for greater checks after social media company Instagram “memorialised” the account of a child who died in tragic circumstances, without the consent of the family.
Computer Weekly has learned that the social media company allows people to memorialise the Instagram accounts of children who have died, making their accounts inactive, without the knowledge or permission of relatives.
In one tragic case, Instagram memorialised the account of a child, who cannot be named for legal reasons, after they died in distressing circumstances. Computer Weekly has learned that the company acted after someone with no connection to the family sent Instagram a link to a press report about the discovery of the child’s body.
The action caused distress to the family at a difficult time, and potentially prevented proper scrutiny of the circumstances of the death. It took the family five years to obtain access to the account, which contained the last messages sent by the child to friends.
Former detective chief inspector Clive Driscoll, the detective who secured convictions for the murder of British teenager Stephen Lawrence, said there should be greater checks on memorialising.
Driscoll told Computer Weekly: “There should be far stronger checks on anyone’s ability to memorialise an account to ensure it’s in line with the family’s wishes. If it’s against the family wishes, and if it could interfere with a police or coroner’s investigation, stronger checks should be made.”
Instagram’s memorialisation service aims to protect the privacy of people after they have died by securing their social media accounts to prevent references to the person’s profile appearing on Instagram in ways that would be upsetting.
Strangers can memorialise accounts
Edina Harbinja, an associate professor in law specialising in digital rights and postmortem privacy, told Computer Weekly that she was not surprised by the case.
She said that under the terms of service, people can memorialise an Instagram account by filling in a form and enclosing an obituary or a news report. “You don’t have to be related at all – a stranger can memorialise the account.”
Harbinja said there have been cases where the Instagram accounts of celebrities have been memorialised after scammers created and reported fake obituaries to Instagram.
In 2021, Vice News reported that a scammer temporarily memorialised the account of the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, by sending the social media firm a fake obituary posted online. That led to the account being locked.
In other cases, families have struggled to obtain information from the social media accounts of children who have died.
In the case of Molly Rose Russell, a 14-year-old who died in 2017, it took her family five years and the intervention of a coroner to obtain access to her Instagram account history. This included images of self-harm, which the coroner found had contributed, along with material on other social media platforms, to her death.
Campaigning by the Molly Rose Foundation led to the UK government prioritising material promoting self-harm as a risk in the Online Safety Act. Clause 79 of the act will require social media companies to make their terms of service clear so that parents can understand what their policy is when dealing with requests from parents of a deceased child about their use of social media.
In 2018, Germany’s highest court found that the parents of a 15-year-old girl who had died some six years earlier should have the right to access her Facebook account under German inheritance law. The family hoped it would shed light on whether her death was suicide.
Instagram improved memorialisation after Covid
Following Covid, Meta-owned Instagram updated its memorialisation process to make it clear that an account had been memorialised by adding the word “remembering” to the account of the deceased person. It has also added the ability to add a “legacy contact” in the event of the user’s death.
According to information published on Instagram’s help pages, users of the service can ask Meta to memorialise an account by submitting a form giving their own name and email address, plus the full name of the deceased person and their Instagram user name. They must also enclose proof of death, which, according to Instagram, could be an obituary or a link to a newspaper report confirming the death.
There is no requirement by Instagram for the person requesting memorialisation to show that they have any relationship to the deceased person or that they have sought permission from family members to memorialise the account.
Families can also request that the account of a deceased person be removed, but this requires more stringent checks, including providing a birth or death certificate, and proof that the person who makes the request is a lawful representative of the deceased. These documents are not required for memorialisation.
Having an easy way to memorialise accounts is important
Harbinja said that while she can understand that families would be distressed if the Instagram account of a child was memorialised without their knowledge, having an easy way to memorialise was important.
Memorialising an account ensures that the dead person does not continue to appear to be still alive on Instagram. Without memorialisation, friends and contacts would be able to see birthday reminders or other communications about the deceased, she said.
“Often, users of Facebook or Instagram do not have all their family members as friends or followers,” she said. “Their friends might be in a better position, because they are constantly seeing that profile, to request memorialisation.”
Tricky balance between benefit and risk
Alec Muffett, a security expert and former Facebook engineer, told Computer Weekly that it is difficult for social media companies to balance conflicting interests when memorialising accounts.
“There has to be a process to ‘memorialise’ accounts when people die – to stop scammers hijacking the accounts of dead people and to better respect how those dead people subsequently appear in others’ social media feeds – but if the memorialisation process is excessively complex or hard to initiate, then it remains unused and the benefits don’t emerge,” he said.
“On the other hand, if it’s too easy to initiate, then people will be surprised, discomforted and inconvenienced at a very sensitive time. It’s a tricky balance between benefit and risk, and it will never be perfect for all situations,” said Muffett.
“If you make it too hard to memorialise an account, you get blamed. If you make it too easy to memorialise an account, you get blamed. If you memorialise an account where the deceased wanted it, but the relatives did not, you get blamed,” he added.
Meta did not respond to repeated requests over the course of a week to answer questions about Instagram’s memorialisation process.
