Facebook finally has a new name: Meta.
During Facebook’s Connect event on Thursday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the name change, saying he hopes, in the future, Facebook will be seen as “a metaverse company.”
“Right now, our 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,” Zuckerberg said.
He said he wanted to create a “new company brand” that will encompass everything it does, from Instagram to Facebook to WhatsApp. He added that, under this new company banner, you won’t have to use Facebook to use the rest of its products.
Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
“Now we have a new north star to help bring the metaverse to life,” Zuckerberg said. “And we have a new name that reflects the full breadth of what we do and the future we want to build.”
The name change only took up the last few moments of Connect, which was largely a push for augmented and virtual reality. Zuckerberg himself said, multiple times during the event, that these AR and VR visions wouldn’t be possible for many years.
Of course, this comes during a particularly rough time for the company. First, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen leaked internal documents to the Wall Street Journal for a series of bombshell reports called The Facebook Files. Among the many revelations from those leaked documents, we learned that Facebook refused to share internal studies showing that the social network is harmful to the health of young people.
Haugen went on to testify in front of the Senate. Later on that week, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp shut down for nearly six hours. Since then, leaked documents called the Facebook Papers have been widely written about in the press.
In response to the name change, the Real Facebook Oversight Board, a group working to hold Facebook accountable for its effects on society, called Facebook’s name change meaningless.
“Changing the name doesn’t change reality: Facebook is destroying our democracy and the world’s leading peddler of disinformation and hate,” the Real Facebook Oversight Board said in a statement.
It looks like Facebook, or Meta, might have to do a bit more than a rebrand to regain trust.
