The rebrand reflects the firm’s push to move its broadening business portfolio beyond social networking and push ahead with plans to develop the o-called metaverse
While the wider company name is being rebranded to Meta, the core Facebook service will remain unchanged (
Image: Getty Images)
Social media giant Facebook has revealed a new company name and brand, Meta.
The rebrand reflects the firm’s push to move its broadening business portfolio beyond social networking and push ahead with plans to develop the so-called metaverse, an online world where people can meet, play and work virtually, often using VR headsets.
While the wider company name is being rebranded to Meta, the core Facebook service will remain unchanged.
This is similar to how Google created a new parent company name, Alphabet, in 2015 to represent its shift beyond simply being a search engine.
Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said the current brand is “so tightly linked to one product that it can’t possibly represent everything that we’re doing today, let alone in the future”.
“Over time, I hope that we are seen as a metaverse company and I want to anchor our work and our identity on what we’re building towards,” he said in a virtual conference.
“We just announced that we were making a fundamental change to our company. We’re now looking at and reporting on our business as two different segments, one for our family of apps, and one for our work on future platforms.
Facebook’s new company name is Meta
“And as part of this, it is time for us to adopt a new company brand to encompass everything that we do to reflect who we are and what we hope to build.
“I am proud to announce that starting today, our company is now Meta.”
The change in name comes amid a string of controversies that have followed the company’s various ventures, particularly the main Facebook platform, Instagram and WhatsApp.
Mark Zuckerberg apologised earlier this month after Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram went down for six to seven hours.
The social media boss said he was ‘sorry for the disruption’ after it emerged he had personally lost more than £4.4billion due to Facebook stock plummeting.
Shares in the company fell by 4.9 per cent on the day of the outage as the firm simultaneously struggled to deal with bombshell claims made by a whistleblower, who said the business “chooses profits over safety”.
Facebook has struggled with controversies in recent weeks after a huge outage that lasted several hours and a whistleblower’s claims that that it was “tearing our societies apart”
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Image:
Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto/REX/Shutterstock)
Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee, told CBS show 60 minutes that it was “tearing our societies apart”.
She also said that Instagram, owned by Facebook, was damaging the mental health of some teenagers, according to the company’s own research.
Ms Haugen said: “The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook. And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimise for its own interests, like making more money.”
She alleged that Facebook was once again allowing misinformation to spread on Facebook after reversing back a change to its algorithm after the 2020 US presidential election where Joe Biden was elected.
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Facebook told MirrorOnline that it has to balance the rights of people to express their opinions with making it a “safe” place.
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