When someone passes away, friends and family can request that we memorialize their accounts. Once memorialized, the word "Remembering" appears above the name on the person's profile so that the account is now a memorial site. Memorializing accounts helps create a space for remembering loved ones and protects against attempted logins and fraudulent activity. To respect the choices someone made while alive, we aim to preserve their account without changes after they pass away.

On Facebook, we have made it possible for people to identify a legacy contact to look after their account after they pass away. To support the bereaved, in some instances, we may remove or change certain content when the legacy contact or family members request it.

Requests to memorialize Facebook or Instagram accounts that belong to deceased users can be made with the requisite information by:

Facebook friends
Instagram followers
Family members with the correct documentation

For victims of murder and suicide we will remove the following content on Facebook and Instagram if it appears on the deceased’s profile photo, cover photo, or among recent timeline posts when requested by a family member of the deceased. We may also remove this content on Facebook when requested by the Facebook legacy contact:

Content related to the deceased's death
Praise or support for the death, disease, or harm of the deceased
Visual depiction of the object used in the deceased’s death.
Imagery of the convicted or alleged murderer of the deceased.
Relationship status or friend status of the convicted or alleged murderer of the deceased

For the following Community Standards, we require additional information and/or context to make the following changes when requested by an authorized representative of the deceased and on Facebook-only, by the legacy contact:

Remove violating comments on a memorialized profile, which would typically require the individual to self report so that we know that they are unwanted.
Change the deceased's individual's privacy settings from public to friends-only when there is harmful content on the profile
Change the name on the profile if it violates our Community Standards, in accordance with our Authentic Name policy
Add friends or followers to the profile if they were removed following the deceased’s passing

User experiences

See some examples of what enforcement looks like for people on Facebook, such as: what it looks like to report something you don’t think should be on Facebook, to be told you’ve violated our Community Standards and to see a warning screen over certain content.

Note: We’re always improving, so what you see here may be slightly outdated compared to what we currently use.

USER EXPERIENCE

Reporting

USER EXPERIENCE

Post-report communication

USER EXPERIENCE

Takedown experience

USER EXPERIENCE

Warning screens

Reporting

1 Universal entry point

We have an option to report, whether it's on a post, comment, story, message, profile or something else.

2 Get started

We help people report things that they don’t think should be on our platform.

3 Select a problem

We ask people to tell us more about what’s wrong. This helps us send the report to the right place.

4 Check your report

Make sure the details are correct before you click Submit. It’s important that the problem selected truly reflects what was posted.

5 Report submitted

After these steps, we submit the report. We also lay out what people should expect next.

6 More options

We remove things if they go against our Community Standards, but you can also Unfollow, Block or Unfriend to avoid seeing posts in future.

Post-report communication

1 Update via notifications

After we’ve reviewed the report, we’ll send the reporting user a notification.

2 More detail in the Support Inbox

We’ll share more details about our review decision in the Support Inbox. We’ll notify people that this information is there and send them a link to it.