Someone added a beard to a photo of Zuck. People like it so much that they want him to grow one for real.

• An edited image showing Mark Zuckerberg with a beard has raised a lot of eyebrows.
• The image inevitably drew the attention of the Meta boss and his wife Priscilla Chan.

The internet has a new crush: bearded Mark Zuckerberg.

An edited image of Zuckerberg with a fake beard has been going viral on social media.

The original screenshot was taken from an Instagram video posted by the Meta CEO, during which he announced a new version of the company's AI, Llama 3.

But one game designer found a different use for the new video — fitting the tech boss with fake facial hair.

The fake image has proved popular with social-media users, with some enthusiastically sharing versions of the "hot" bearded Zuckerberg.

Some users even took the opportunity to encourage the Meta CEO to grow some real facial hair.

"Bro, grow your beard out," one user commented on Zuckerberg's original post. "I saw what it would look like."

Even Zuckerberg himself acknowledged the trend. After the image was posted on Instagram by The Shade Room, Zuckerberg commented: "Okay who did this?

Zuckerberg's wife, Priscilla Chan, also shared a photo of her bearded husband on her Instagram story, per People. "Anyone seen my husband???" she joked. "And who is this guy?"

While it's not clear exactly how the image was altered, digital manipulation of images has become a wider concern recently, following the furor around Kate Middleton's admission that she edited a picture of her family released by Kensington Palace last month.

As for the Zuckerberg photo, the image was shared so widely on X and other platforms that some users failed to notice it was fake.

"That bearded photo of Zuck wasn't real, but it subtly changed some people's perception of him," entrepreneur Varun Mayya said of the photo in an X post. "Post-truth era."