open letters

Dear Mark Zukerberg,

I guess I've already addressed you on the issue of dead people's accounts, but it doesn't seem to stop coming up in new and sort of horrifying ways.  This morning I found I had been "tagged" by a dead friend who wanted me to know that Ray Bans are on sale for a ten percent discount.  In life, he was not the sort of person who would have worn (or promoted) Ray Bans, and even less so in death.  Not only had he tagged me, but also about forty of our other mutual high school friends, and among the list of those tagged, another one was, you guessed it, dead.  She might have worn Ray Bans but I doubt it.  I wonder how many of the people who received notifications about Ray Bans through one of these dead friends or another went out today and bought some?  I wonder how many will?

Stupid social media.  It's all free, and so we haven't any right to complain, not really, not even when ghoulish things like this happen, but I find it jarring when the dead send me messages - through Facebook or any other medium.  I fear it also means I might start to tune out the messages from the dead until I miss a real one.  Mark Zukerberg, it isn't your problem alone to address this.  But I wonder what you can do, if anything.  I know I would appreciate it.