The internet is forever, and now your engagement on it could be too.
Meta was recently granted a patent in Dec, 2025 that would essentially allow the social media platform to post on a dormant user’s behalf—whether they took a break from social media or long after they’ve passed away. The patent, first filed in 2023, describes a large language model that “simulates” a user’s social media activity, using a user’s comments, likes, or content to respond to other users and also references technology that would simulate video or audio calls with users.
Using AI to revive the dead, through text, speech, or video is nothing new, but the technology described in the patent has the added dynamic of using a deceased user’s existing account chock full of posts and photos among other content to continue to interact with other users, ultimately driving engagement on Meta’s platforms. Meta’s Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth noted in the patent that account inactivity (say that of a deceased person’s) can affect other users’ experiences, and the impact of inactivity is “much more severe and permanent” when a user is deceased, he wrote. Experts say this rationale is a new way of justifying bringing users’ content back to life.
“That’s a really interesting shift because that suggests that user death is like an engagement problem.” Elaine Kasket, a cyberpsychologist, told Fortune, describing how she interpreted the patent. She has studied digital afterlives for 21 years—long before social media or AI became a part of everyday life—and what happens to our data after we’re gone.
“We have no plans to move forward with this example,” a Meta spokesperson told Fortune in a statement. While a patent does not mean the company is actively pursuing the technology, Meta and the patent’s primary author, Bosworth, will continue to explore applications for large language models, the spokesperson wrote.
Currently, Facebook and Instagram allow users to remove or “memorialize” their loved ones’ accounts, which designates the profile of a deceased user with the “Remembering” label and blocks anyone from logging in.
Interrupting grief
Meta is not the first Big Tech company to patent a model to keep the formerly alive still kicking online. Well before the AI era began, Microsoft filed a patent in 2017 for a method to create a chatbot based on a person’s “social data,” including images, social media posts, messages, voice data and written letters.
Microsoft’s Tim O’Brien, who previously managed the company’s AI programs, called the technology “disturbing” after the company announced they had no plans to develop the technology.
In the years since Microsoft was granted the patent, products offering to recreate the likeness of the dead have shifted from a novelty to services people use daily.
“It’s a very uncomfortable and not very psychologically-helpful turn towards [a] technologically solving for all sorts of difficult human emotions,” Kasket said. “You’ll hear some founders saying, ‘Oh, we’d like to solve for grief in 10 years,’ which I think is a really ridiculous notion.”
Grief is “extremely idiosyncratic,” she explained, adding different grievers could have very different reactions to the same profile developed from digital remains.
Kasket said technologies like the one described in a patent may put up a roadblock in the healing process for those undergoing grief. Sherry Turkle, a sociologist, psychologist, and founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology, agrees, adding that while this might seem like a small-scale proposal, large-scale efforts are on the horizon.
“Technology has always been used in rituals that are designed to make death bearable,” Turkle told Fortune in an email.Photography was initially envisioned as a way to capture faces at the moment of death, she explained, and recording was similarly envisaged to capture someone’s last words. Meta’s plans build off those ideas but interrupts the grieving process, she wrote. The ability to apologize to the dead or tell them that you love them or are thinking about them, allows people to mourn, grow, and change, she added.
“Now, in Meta’s plan, we deny death to participate in a perpetual fantasy life. The seance never has to end,” she wrote.
