Even in death, you will continue to generate value for Mark Zuckerberg. In what sounds like something out of Black Mirror (probably because it literally is something out of Black Mirror) it’s confirmed that Facebook‘s parent company, Meta has been granted a patent for an AI that will “simulate” a person’s social media activity after their death.
Imagine, you and your partner have a baby and post an image of your new family to Facebook. Soon after you get a video call and answer, seeing Grandma beaming down the line as she tells you how proud she is of you and how your new daughter looks just like your mother. It’d be touching… if we hadn’t buried her six months ago…
Meta’s patent was filed by Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s Chief Technical Officer. It muses that users become unhappy when their relatives quit social media, and that “the impact on the users is much more severe and permanent if that user is deceased and can never return to the social networking platform.”
The obvious solution is to crack open the virtual coffin and drag that mouldy user out of the grave and back onto the platform. This would be a kind of “digital clone” trained on the kinds of comments they made, what they liked, and the media they posted, essentially trying to predict how a person may react if they were still in the land of the living.
It’s confirmed that this social media undead version of you would be able to DM and video or audio call you, doubtless with an AI-generated image drawn from photographs and footage they posted while alive.
“Let the dead be dead”
Naturally, this is opening up a whole can of ethical worms as people grapple with whether it’s moral or healthy to do this. Joseph Davis, a sociology professor at the University of Virginia, says it’s absolutely not healthy at all:
“One of the tasks of grief is to face the actual loss. Let the dead be dead. The idea of bringing them back, but you’re not really doing that, but in fact, it looks like that. That’s the confusion.”
Perhaps fortunately, while Meta is exploring this tech, they have also said there are no current plans to implement it. But can it really be only a matter of time before one of the big tech firms realizes there’s a lot of money to be made from grief?
After all, imagine the revenue that could be made with a monthly subscription to Grandma, perhaps with users nudged by videos of her weeping and begging her grandchildren to upgrade to the Premium Package so she can tell them just how much she really loves them in full 4K?
Published: Feb 17, 2026 07:14 am