Facebook Has a New Company Name

Let the rebranding begin: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Thursday that his company is rebranding itself as Meta in an effort to encompass its virtual-reality vision for the future, per the AP. The move comes widespread criticism that the company has knowingly caused social harm on its platform across the world, and critics see this as an attempt to deflect bad press and perhaps ward off regulators, notes Axios. The social network everyone knows as Facebook will not change its name, but it will now have a parent company with bigger priorities. (Similar to what the founders of Google did with Alphabet.)

“From now on, we’re going to be the metaverse first. Not Facebook first,” Zuckerberg said in his keynote speech at the company's annual hardware event, per the Washington Post. “Facebook is of for 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.”

Zuckerberg says he expects the metaverse to reach a billion people within the next decade. The metaverse, he says, will be a place people will be able to interact, work, and create products and content in what he hopes will be a new ecosystem that creates millions of jobs for creators. In explaining the rebrand, Zuckerberg said the name “Facebook” just doesn't encompass everything the company does any more. In addition to its primary social network, that now includes Instagram, Messenger, its Quest VR headset, its Horizon VR platform, and more. (More Facebook stories.)