{"id":10718,"date":"2025-06-28T18:16:55","date_gmt":"2025-06-28T18:16:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/dead-lawmakers-tweet-from-beyond-the-grave\/"},"modified":"2025-06-28T18:16:55","modified_gmt":"2025-06-28T18:16:55","slug":"dead-lawmakers-tweet-from-beyond-the-grave","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/dead-lawmakers-tweet-from-beyond-the-grave\/","title":{"rendered":"Dead lawmakers tweet from beyond the grave"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

After Zohran Mamdani\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

The only problem \u2014 Jackson Lee died last July.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cDear White Staffers,\u201d 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\u2019s account had liked the congratulatory post for Mamdani, captioning the screengrab<\/a> with a quizzical emoji.<\/p>\n

But Jackson Lee isn\u2019t the only deceased lawmaker whose presence continues to be felt online.<\/p>\n

Rep. Sylvester Turner, a Democrat who filled Lee\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cHappy #OpeningDay!\u201d Turner\u2019s personal account posted<\/a> on MLB Opening Day, adding the hashtag \u201cNewProfilePic\u201d along with a photo of the late lawmaker holding a baseball. A community guidelines note affixed by X to the post noted that \u201cSylvester Turner died on March 5, 2025.\u201d<\/p>\n

The post appeared to shock many X users, who commented on how uncanny it was to see the deceased lawmaker active on their feeds. \u201cGrim,\u201d one user wrote<\/a>, while another asked<\/a>: \u201cSo no one on his team thinks this is weird?\u201d<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, James Walkinshaw, to replace him, having announced that he planned to step away from Congress after his esophageal cancer returned in April.<\/p>\n

People on Connolly\u2019s mailing list have also reportedly continued receiving emails<\/a> from the late representative\u2019s campaign encouraging Virginians to vote for Walkinshaw in Saturday\u2019s special election, the newsletter Chaotic Era highlighted<\/a> \u2014 and directing donations to Walkinshaw\u2019s campaign.<\/p>\n

But after Connolly\u2019s posthumous post came under scrutiny this week, it disappeared from the late Virginian\u2019s page on Thursday.<\/p>\n

Brian Garcia, communications director for Walkinshaw\u2019s campaign, emphasized that the campaign does not direct the content posted from Connolly\u2019s 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,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The bio for Connolly\u2019s page notes that the lawmaker died in May, and says that posts on the page are made with Connolly\u2019s family\u2019s consent. Turner’s account also appears to be run by his family<\/a>, with the account recently posting a video featuring his daughter promoting a Houston parade he championed.<\/p>\n

But the case of posthumous tweeting fingers isn\u2019t a new phenomenon.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> at then-presidential candidate Joe Biden and pro-Trump content \u2014 as well as conspiracy theories about the virus that had taken Cain\u2019s own life.<\/p>\n

The posts initially appeared under Cain\u2019s 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 \u201cCain Gang.\u201d<\/p>\n

The account remained active until March 2021, when it released its final post, saying \u201cIt\u2019s time<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 and sometimes continues posting to social media, albeit not typically under the lawmaker\u2019s name. And there\u2019s even less clarity around lawmakers\u2019 social media accounts that they use for campaigning, as opposed to official work.<\/p>\n

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\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

Although there were content rules on what staff members were allowed to post to Young\u2019s accounts \u2014 political, policy-related and ideological posts were off-limits \u2014 there was no guidance on what to do with the accounts themselves.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen a member of Congress dies, nobody seems to care about getting the log-ins from you, or assuming control of the Facebook page,\u201d Brown said. \u201cI still, if I wanted to, could go post to Facebook as Congressman Young \u2014 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brown continued serving in the Alaskan\u2019s office for four months after his death, administering the affairs of the office and helping wind down its operations to prepare for Young\u2019s replacement after the special election.<\/p>\n

While the process of physically closing down Young\u2019s office was \u201cmeticulous,\u201d with individual files and knickknacks from the lawmaker\u2019s office requiring logging, the \u201cdigital aspect of it was completely ignored,\u201d Brown said.<\/p>\n

Brown noted that failing to properly administer a lawmaker\u2019s social media presence is also a constituent services issue, as many people reach out to their representative\u2019s offices via direct message for assistance.<\/p>\n

But most of all, Brown cautioned, a lack of procedure for how to handle dead lawmaker\u2019s\u2019 socials poses a host of security risks that would normally be unthinkable for physical record-keeping.<\/p>\n

\u201cI 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,\u201d Brown said. \u201cWhy does somebody who had social media access have that power to do that with tweets?\u201d<\/p>\n

Nicholas Wu contributed to this report.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After Zohran Mamdani\u2019s 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 \u2014 Jackson Lee died last July. From ghost-likes and new profile pictures to a posthumous endorsement, accounts for dead lawmakers have seemingly resurrected […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10718","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10718","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10718"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10718\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}