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Why people are keeping their deceased ones alive through social media accounts
Updated On: 08 January, 2023 11:31 AM IST | Mumbai | Nidhi Lodaya
With Elon Musk deciding to delete inactive Twitter accounts, we ask people who are keeping the social media accounts of their deceased loved ones alive, why does their digital legacy matter?
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KK with his son Nakul and daughter Taamara. The family decides what to post on KK’s Instagram account and it is mostly to communicate with his fans
The last post on Bollywood singer KK’s Instagram account was in October 2022, roughly five months after his sudden death in Kolkata last May. “After he passed, I spoke to Nakul [his son], about what we should do with his account,” says Shubham Bhatt, KK’s manager, “and we decided to not deactivate it as it was a way to reach out to all his fans. We saw it as a means to communicate with the fans and put out messages whenever the family felt like sharing anything,” he says. The singer’s posthumous Instagram account is now of the many belonging to renowned artistes across the globe, who have an active account after their death.
Last month, Elon Musk announced that Twitter will be “deleting and freeing name space” of 1.5 billion accounts that have been inactive. While this may be a helpful move for a social media platform, the emotional value of an account of a deceased person can only be understood by family and friends, and in some cases, fans and admirers. People often re-read tweets, or gaze lovingly at old posts of their loved ones on social media. It’s like in the times that existed before social media, people read an old diary or looked at photographs stuck in a scrapbook.
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