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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

Worse yet a relative of mine passed away almost 10 years ago due to an accident. His "other family" decided to take over his account. They used it to spam insults towards someone who was there during the accident and threw blame for the death. It was disgraceful.

There is no way for me to tell Facebook to ban the profile no matter what I tried. I see the same issue on Instagram for very specific issues you cannot report profiles. I even wrote in a textbox "this person is dead!" and Facebook didnt bother. If its an active account its good for business right?

In the case of Instagram a music artist I follow got hacked. The Instagram report system is completely useless in this regard. He is a verified user too. Nothing was done and probably nothing will be done. Active accounts are good for business even if they are hacked or diseased peoples accounts (same thing tbh).

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> I see the same issue on Instagram for very specific issues you cannot report profiles.

It came up recently that in order to report an imposter account, you have to tag the person who the account is impersonating.

So if that person doesn't have a known account, as is the case with Katie Bouman, there is no in-app mechanism for reporting it. Even when the issue was brought to them directly, Instagram asked what her main account is:

https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/11168119898195107...

The result is that a redpiller with tens of thousands of existing followers from previously impersonating others using the same account is allowed to call himself and operate as the "official" Katie Bouman account. It's a great system.

Hmm, if IG allows an impersonation account as long as no "official" account exists, you could try creating a second impersonation account and claiming it is official in the report of the first impersonation.

Put IG back on the spot to make a call.

I've ran into that as well which gets worse:

The artist who was hacked didn't show up on the list because they didn't have the check mark. Instagram should remove that checkmark if your username changes, or even lock down an IG account if a username change is attempted. It's very rare for an artist to change their username.

Back when I was in high school, nearly a decade ago, a classmate died and her friends were careful to not report it to Facebook because they wanted her account to stay active. At that time it seemed like Facebook had a policy of sunsetting accounts after a mourning period where the family could get the data off it. Is that not a policy anymore?

Nah, my best friend died 5 years ago, his FB account is still up. I suppose it's possible that everyone posting on his wall when his birthday hits each year might reset some counter, though.

As far as I can remember, you have to tell them the person died, they don't algorithmically try to detect that part.

It's now up to the family to either have Facebook keep it up as a memorial account or ask that it be taken down. https://www.facebook.com/help/1111566045566400/?helpref=hc_f...

How did they take over his account? Did they know his password? Or is there a way to get access to account after someone is dead?

They likely knew / reset his passwords based on person information, not hard to be hacked once you're dead since you can't put a stop to it all.

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