Facebook broadens its scope, announces new name
Facebook on Thursday changed its name to Meta, part of a strategic shift to emphasize the development of its virtual world while its main social network business is in crisis.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg made the announcement at Connect, the company’s annual event where it talks about products like the Portal video devices and Oculus headsets.
The rebranding – pegged to a virtual world and hardware known as the “metaverse” – comes amid a broader effort to shift attention away from revelations that it knew its platform was causing a litany of social harms.
The Facebook social network is not changing its name. “From now on, we’re going to be the metaverse first. Not Facebook first,” Zuckerberg said in his keynote. “Facebook is one of the most used products in the world. But increasingly, it doesn’t encompass everything that we do. Right now, our brand is so tightly linked to one product that it can’t possibly represent everything we are doing.”
A whistleblower has came forward with tens of thousands of documents demonstrating how the company was aware that it caused polarization in numerous countries, led people down rabbit holes of misinformation, and failed to stop a violent network that led to the Jan. 6 insurrection. In response, lawmakers around the world have threatened new regulation for the tech industry, as well as demanding more information from Facebook on what it knew and when.
The documents were obtained by a consortium of news organizations, including The Washington Post, and were provided to Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission in response to a whistleblower lawsuit.