Dead members of Congress can’t stop tweeting
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Dead members of Congress can’t stop posting online. Accounts for recently deceased lawmakers have continued to post on social media, highlighting how little official policy there is for how to handle their online presence after they die.
POLITICO reports:
After Zohran Mamdani’s apparent victory in the New York Democratic mayoral primary on Tuesday, former Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) liked an Instagram post congratulating him on his win.
The only problem — Jackson Lee died last July.
From ghost-likes and new profile pictures to a posthumous endorsement, accounts for dead lawmakers have seemingly resurrected on social media in an unsettling trend of beyond-the-grave engagement.
Rep. Sylvester Turner, a Democrat who filled Lee’s Texas seat for a brief two months before his own passing in March 2025, appeared to change his profile picture on X three weeks after he died…
Former Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Virginia Democrat who died in May, has also continued to make waves from beyond the grave, as his political social media accounts chugged back to life to notify followers that early voting had begun in the race to fill his vacant seat…
An account for political activist, brief 2012 GOP presidential primary leader and staunch Trump supporter Herman Cain resurfaced two weeks after he died in July 2020 from a weekslong battle with Covid-19. The account posted attacks at then-presidential candidate Joe Biden and pro-Trump content — as well as conspiracy theories about the virus that had taken Cain’s own life…
How to handle the social media presence of politicians when they die is a fairly new phenomenon. If a member of the House dies, for example, their office often remains open to fulfill constituent services — and sometimes continues posting to social media, albeit not typically under the lawmaker’s name. And there’s even less clarity around lawmakers’ social media accounts that they use for campaigning, as opposed to official work.
Zack Brown, who was the communications director for Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) when he died in office in March 2022, said there is no official process for handing off control of lawmakers’ social media accounts if they die while still serving. That leaves communications staff in an awkward bind on how to proceed with languishing accounts, he said.
Although there were content rules on what staff members were allowed to post to Young’s accounts — political, policy-related and ideological posts were off-limits — there was no guidance on what to do with the accounts themselves.
“When a member of Congress dies, nobody seems to care about getting the log-ins from you, or assuming control of the Facebook page,” Brown said. “I still, if I wanted to, could go post to Facebook as Congressman Young — I could still tweet today as Congressman Young. And nobody from archives or records or from House administration, or anybody, seems to give a shit.”
Brown continued serving in the Alaskan’s office for four months after his death, administering the affairs of the office and helping wind down its operations to prepare for Young’s replacement after the special election.
While the process of physically closing down Young’s office was “meticulous,” with individual files and knickknacks from the lawmaker’s office requiring logging, the “digital aspect of it was completely ignored,” Brown said. Brown noted that failing to properly administer a lawmaker’s social media presence is also a constituent services issue, as many people reach out to their representative’s offices via direct message for assistance.
A fun NYC event: Garbage Day Live
Garbage Day (an awesome newsletter run by my friend Ryan Broderick) is doing a three-night residency live show at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn this July. Tickets are officially on sale and each night has a different theme and different guests. On night one will be internet reporting icon Kat Tenbarge. Night two will be Peter McIndoe, the genius behind Birds Aren’t Real, and night three will be Akilah Hughes. You can grab tickets for each night by clicking the links below!