The social media accounts of recently deceased lawmakers remain active, raising concerns over the lack of official guidelines for managing their digital presence posthumously.
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.
“Dear White Staffers,” an anonymous account dedicated to highlighting experiences and perspectives of non-white congressional staffers, on Wednesday posted a screenshot of a notification that the late Texas representative’s account had liked the congratulatory post for Mamdani, captioning the screengrab with a quizzical emoji.
But Jackson Lee isn’t the only deceased lawmaker whose presence continues to be felt online.
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.
“Happy #OpeningDay!” Turner’s personal account posted on MLB Opening Day, adding the hashtag “NewProfilePic” along with a photo of the late lawmaker holding a baseball. A community guidelines note affixed by X to the post noted that “Sylvester Turner died on March 5, 2025.”
The post appeared to shock many X users, who commented on how uncanny it was to see the deceased lawmaker active on their feeds. “Grim,” one user wrote, while another asked: “So no one on his team thinks this is weird?”