On Thursday, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook has changed its name to Meta. The announcement of this rebranding was made during the company’s annual developers conference and amid increased scrutiny from political quarters raising concerns over the social media giant’s safety practices.
Zuckerberg, announcing an overhaul, said in his statement that the new name reflects the company’s focus to broaden its reach beyond social media into areas like virtual reality as reported by BBC News.
The Facebook Boss took this opportunity to unveil plans to build a “metaverse” world where people can game, work and communicate in a virtual environment using VR handsets. The new name will serve to “reflect who we are and the future we hope to build” said Zuckerberg.
This change does not apply to platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp and will only be limited to the parent company owning them.
Zuckerberg said that word Meta is derived from the Greek word for “beyond” and better represents the company now as Facebook “doesn’t encompass everything we do”.
Further elaborating on this the Facebook CEO added “Right now our brand is so tightly linked to one product that it can’t possibly represent everything we’re doing today, let alone in the future.”
This development comes shortly after a series of negative stories surfacedabout Facebook, based on documents leaked by an ex-employee reported BBC news.
Furthermore the company has been accused by Frances Haugen as putting “profits over safety”.
Recently the company has revealed plans to hire an additional 10,000 staff who will work on the metaverse.
The company will also invest $150 in skilling up creators in the new ways of using metaverse as well as $10 billion on Facebook Reality Labs, which is building the metaverse.
Zuckerberg announced that “from now on, we will be metaverse-first, not Facebook-first. That means that over time you won’t need a Facebook account to use our other services.”
Sharing his vision for the future, Zuckerberg said that he hoped that within the next decade the metaverse will reach a billion people, host digital commerce worth hundreds of billions of dollars and support jobs for millions of creators and developers.
Facebook changes its parent company name to ‘Meta’
