Questions raised about Instagram memorialisation in Noah Donohoe inquest

Pet tortoise

A report from Meta provided to the coroner’s court showed that the family’s shared email, named after a pet tortoise, had been used to fill in a form requesting that Meta memorialise Donohoe’s account on 28 June 2020, the day after he died.

The form gave a child’s name and the family email, and enclosed a link to a BBC report of Noah Donohoe’s death to support the request. Memorialising effectively froze the account, making its contents, including Noah Donohoe’s messages, inaccessible to his mother and to the coroner’s inquiry.

Three members of the family, identified as M1, M2 and M3 to protect their identities, gave evidence in court from behind a screen. They were seen only by the jury and Noah’s mother Fiona Donohoe.

M1 confirmed that he was a first-year student at St Malachy’s College at the time Noah Donohoe, a third-year pupil in the same school, went missing.  

He told the court that he had no contact with Noah Donohoe and had never spoken to him. “I only realised when I saw his name on a poster that I had seen him at school,” he said.

Peter Coll KC, representing the coroner, asked M1 if he knew how his name and the family email had been used on a form to Meta to memorialise Donohoe’s Instagram account.

M1 said: “I had no idea how that happened. I was only 12 years old when that happened.”

M2, the sister of M1, told the court she would have used the family email address for playing games. She said that she did not know Noah Donohoe, but became aware of him after the case appeared on the news.

She told the court that she did not know anything about memorialisation until an investigator from the coroner’s court turned up at her door and spoke to her mother. “I can’t even describe how shocking it was,” she said.

M2 confirmed that she had requested to follow Noah’s Instagram account after hearing about the case. The court also heard that hundreds of other people had also requested to follow his Instagram account.

She agreed that her brother, who was only 11 at the time of Noah’s disappearance, was not “social media savvy” and that she did not recall him talking about Instagram and memorialisation.

Asked about the form submitted to Meta quoting a BBC article about Noah Donohoe, M2 said she did not use the BBC as a source of information, but got her information from Sky television news and social media.

Mother locked out of Noah’s account

Brenda Campbell KC, representing Fiona Donohoe, said that as a consequence of Noah’s account being memorialised, his mother had been “locked out” of the account.

“From the day after she learned that her child had died, she had no access to his private social media on Instagram. When Noah’s mum wanted to look at any messages he was sending to understand who he was in contact with, the only thing she could do was look at the public side of the account. So she was locked out,” she said.

Campbell said that memorialising the account had the potential to deprive the inquest of a huge amount of information on Noah before he died. “But for the coroner, we may never have had that information,” she said.

Campbell said that one of Noah’s mother’s concerns was that someone might have memorialised the account deliberately to deprive her of evidence.

Instagram accounts hacked

M2 said that in 2020 her and her brother’s Instagram accounts had been hacked.

“Back in 2020, there was an epidemic of Instagram accounts being hacked. It was always scam sites,” she said. “I know my brother’s account was hacked and my account was hacked.”

She said she had reported the hacking to Instagram, which sorted it out, allowing her to change the password, but she did not know what happened to her brother’s Instagram account.

M3, the mother of the two children, said the family email was still live but that no one uses it. It had previously been used for games, and M3 had used it for shopping. She said that she only became aware of Noah Donohoe after he went missing and “it was all over the news”.

M3 said Noah’s mother came to her place of work and gave out stickers to raise awareness of the case after he disappeared. She said she had been praying for Donohoe.

The witness said that her children, M1 and M2, had not tried to memorialise Noah’s social media accounts, to her knowledge, and that she was unable to explain how their shared family email address came to be on that form sent to Meta.

Questioned by Kate Hanley, counsel for Fiona Donohoe, M3 said she was surprised when she was told about the memorialisation of Noah’s account. “I did not have any idea. It was mind-blowing,” she said.

She agreed that Instagram required very little information, accepting only a name, email and a BBC article as sufficient proof of death.

Hanley said the email address quoted by Meta was incorrect as it ended in .con – an apparent misspelling – rather than .com, and that it therefore seemed unlikely that Meta had requested any verification before memorialising the account.

Detective calls for Meta to change policies

Computer Weekly previously reported that former detective chief inspector Clive Driscoll, the detective who secured convictions for the murder of British teenager Stephen Lawrence, had called for Meta to conduct more thorough checks before memorialising Instagram accounts.

Driscoll told Computer Weekly: “There should be far stronger checks on anyone’s ability to memorialise an account to ensure it’s in line with the family’s wishes. If it’s against the family wishes, and if it could interfere with a police or coroner’s investigation, stronger checks should be made.”

Instagram’s memorialisation service aims to protect the privacy of people after their death by securing their social media accounts to prevent references to the person’s profile appearing on Instagram in ways that would be upsetting.

Computer Weekly has learned that the social media company allows people to memorialise the Instagram accounts of children who have died, making their accounts inactive, without the knowledge or permission of relatives.

The inquest continues.