Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced today at the company’s Connect event that the company’s new name will be Meta which comes from the work Metaverse. The company has ditched the “f” blue logo and now has an infinity symbol with the same color palette. “We are a company that builds technology to connect,” Zuckerberg said. “Together, we can finally put people at the center of our technology. And together, we can unlock a massively bigger creator economy.”
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“To reflect who we are and what we hope to build,” he added. He said the name Facebook doesn’t fully encompass everything the company does now and is still closely linked to one product. “But over time, I hope we are seen as a metaverse company.”
Zuckerberg has already gone ahead to secure the Twitter handle @meta and the website meta.com, is now redirecting to a welcome page on Facebook that outlines the changes.
Why is Facebook now called Meta?
The rebrand is part of the company’s efforts to less be known as just a social media company to focus on Zuckerberg’s plans for building the metaverse. Zuckerberg wrote in a blog post-Thursday that the company’s corporate structure would not be changing, but how it reports financial results will. “Starting with our results for the fourth quarter of 2021, we plan to report on two operating segments: Family of Apps and Reality Labs” he explained. “We also intend to start trading under the new stock ticker we have reserved, MVRS, on December 1. Today’s announcement does not affect how we use or share data.”
Before the rebrand to Meta, Facebook has been under intense scrutiny over the past several weeks, after revelations based on damning internal documents provided to the Wall Street Journal by whistleblower Frances Haugen showed, among other things, that Facebook’s Instagram platform had become a toxic place for teenagers, especially girls. And antitrust regulators are pushing for the company to be broken up, as public trust in the social media platform is flagging.
