Dead lawmakers tweet from beyond the grave

Politico

13 hours ago

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?'
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. Before his passing, Connolly had endorsed his former chief of staff, James Walkinshaw, to replace him, having announced that he planned to step away from Congress after his esophageal cancer returned in April.
People on Connolly's mailing list have also reportedly continued receiving emails from the late representative's campaign encouraging Virginians to vote for Walkinshaw in Saturday's special election, the newsletter Chaotic Era highlighted — and directing donations to Walkinshaw's campaign.
But after Connolly's posthumous post came under scrutiny this week, it disappeared from the late Virginian's page on Thursday.
Brian Garcia, communications director for Walkinshaw's campaign, emphasized that the campaign does not direct the content posted from Connolly's accounts. 'Supervisor Walkinshaw is proud to have earned the support of Congressman Connolly before he passed away and to now have the support of the Connolly family,' he said.
The bio for Connolly's page notes that the lawmaker died in May, and says that posts on the page are made with Connolly's family's consent. Turner's account also appears to be run by his family, with the account recently posting a video featuring his daughter promoting a Houston parade he championed.
But the case of posthumous tweeting fingers isn't a new phenomenon.
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.
The posts initially appeared under Cain's original account, bearing his name and profile picture. But his daughter shortly thereafter explained in a blog post that members of his family had taken over his social media presence and would continue posting under the new name 'Cain Gang.'
The account remained active until March 2021, when it released its final post, saying 'It's time.'
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.
But most of all, Brown cautioned, a lack of procedure for how to handle dead lawmaker's' socials poses a host of security risks that would normally be unthinkable for physical record-keeping.
'I can't walk into the National Archives right now and just go behind closed doors and take whatever files from Congressman Young that I want,' Brown said. 'Why does somebody who had social media access have that power to do that with tweets?'
Nicholas Wu contributed to this report.