Facebook has changed its company name to Meta, as part of a rebranding that will see the social platform become just one of several products under the new company, announced Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday.
– From today, our company is Meta – said Zuckerberg, announcing the company’s pivot.
The company states that the new name will better reflect what it does, at a time when it is expanding beyond social media into areas such as virtual reality (VR).
The change does not apply to individual platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp, but only to the parent company of which they are a part.
– Our mission remains the same. Our apps and our brands, they do not change – said Zuckerberg, and Instagram and WhatsApp are now expected to join Facebook as brands of Meta.
The thirty-seven-year-old founder of Facebook sees the future in the metaverse, an online world where people can use various devices to navigate and communicate in a virtual environment.
The concept of the metaverse aims to transfer reality to the internet, and its full development will take about 10 to 15 years.
Zuckerberg has been talking about the ‘metaverse’ since July, and the unusual term, which first emerged in a dystopian novel 30 years ago, is also mentioned by other tech companies, such as Microsoft.
The renaming of Facebook also comes after several scandals regarding issues such as the company’s role in manipulating democratic processes or massive data leaks that resulted in some users being hacked. A former Facebook manager previously accused the company in October of harming children and sowing division in society, and that it is aware of this.
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