Because Zuckerburg structured it that way so FB owns the account and content.

Imagine a world where children don’t buy diaries and journals but some unscrupulous corporation gives them to children for free...now go ahead and write all your personal secrets in there and the corporation will own the rights to those secrets and use them to sell to other unscrupulous corporations to decide if the children are a good fit for their product advertising.

If it sounds far fetheched it’s not, if it sounds deeply disturbing it is...not only because it is real and happening, but because everyday Facebook (and other tech companies) are entering into contracts with minors, which these kings of data know or should know are illegal contracts to begin with (in the US minors can not enter into contracts unless necessary)

You‘d need a legal reason for the contract between user and Facebook to be terminated.

The heir enters the contractual relationship in the decedent‘s stead, with all privileges and obligations.

At least in Germany.

I'm not sure though if that has to be the case though. Some contract types terminate automatically, question is if that is only legally possible for those special cases or if any contract can be written that way. Similarly if data deletion clauses could be challenged or not - being party to a contract that says all data has to be wiped if person X dies doesn't help you with gaining access to that data. That of course isn't part of the current social media user agreements, but could very well be added now as an option.

Then again, it‘s doubtful if a minor can enter into such an agreement.

Practically speaking, I think there are so many tangents to go off here that basically the courts could decide whatever they consider „right“, and that‘s probably in favor of the parents.

True, that's an interesting question. I'd guess it might follow the rules for writing a will, so you'd have to be 16, and even then a court might override it for the parents.

>FB owns the account and content.

FB does not own content you post, you grant them a distribution license. You still own the copyright to your own original work.

Well minors can’t enter into contracts to grant FB distribution rights, therefore, those contracts are void as a matter of law.

thus ... FB does NOT own the content, regardless.

does that mean a minor can sue fb for distributing their content?

Welcome in Germany, where my data ist my property independent of what some american corporate bully wants.

I should clarify that if Facebook understands that the person is deceased, the account should either be stripped off the data and just kept for mourning purposes or deleted. This data is private ownership of the original person only and should be deleted after their death.