Social Media Links

"We knew about his Facebook and Instagram — but we had no idea about the rest."

When Jamie passed away at 34, his family thought they knew his digital world. They'd seen him on Facebook. They followed him on Instagram. But in the weeks after his death, they started discovering accounts they never knew existed.

"We found an X account — what used to be Twitter," his sister recalls. "He had a couple of hundred followers. We didn't even know he used it. And then a LinkedIn profile, which made sense, but none of us had access or knew what he'd want done with it."

The hardest part wasn't finding the accounts — it was realising that every single platform had its own process for dealing with a death. Facebook had one set of forms. Instagram had another. X required different documentation entirely. LinkedIn had its own procedure. Each one needed proof, each one had different timelines, and none of them talked to each other.

"We were grieving and filling in form after form," his brother says. "Some platforms responded quickly. Others took weeks. One of them we never managed to resolve at all. And all along, we didn't know if Jamie would have wanted these accounts memorialised, deleted, or left alone."

If Jamie had spent just a short time listing his accounts and leaving clear instructions — even just a note saying "delete this one" or "keep this active" — his family would have known exactly what to do, and who to contact on his behalf.