WashingtonPost: Facebook on Thursday announced it 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.
Facebook CEO Mark
Zuckerberg made the Meta name change announcement at Connect, the company’s
annual hardware event where it talks about products like the Portal video
devices and Oculus headsets.
The rebranding into
Meta — 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
come forward with tens of thousands of documents demonstrating how the company
was aware that it caused polarization in numerous countries, led people down misinformation rabbit holes and
failed to stop a violent network that led to the January 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.
Facebook has said that
the Facebook Papers are a “coordinated effort to selectively use leaked
documents to paint a false picture of our company.”
Facebook was already
trying to change the subject even before The Wall Street Journal first reported
on the documents. Zuckerberg has told colleagues that he no longer wants to be
the face of the company’s headaches in Washington and elsewhere, according to
reporting by The Post, and is focused on transitioning Facebook to become a
“metaverse.”
The term, which is
derived from science fiction but has become popular among some venture
capitalists in Silicon Valley, refers to tech services as virtual
interconnected worlds.
Facebook started as a
social network in a college dorm room 17 years ago, but has become a
conglomerate encompassing Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, as well as a
nascent online payments and hardware businesses. That has led some in the tech
industry, as well as employees, to speculate that the company was long overdue
for a name change.
Facebook also isn’t
the first Silicon Valley company to rebrand itself. Google changed its parent
company name to Alphabet in 2015 in an attempt to unify a corporate behemoth
that encompassed not only search and display advertising but also driverless cars
and a life sciences division. Snapchat changed its name to Snap Inc. in an
attempt to rebrand itself as a camera company.
Zuckerberg said this
summer that the company would eventually become known as a metaverse, and then
subsequently announced a smart glasses partnership with Ray-Ban and a plan to
use its virtual reality headsets for work-related videoconferencing. He
promoted a longtime friend who heads the hardware division, Andrew Bosworth, to
become the company’s new Chief Technology Officer.
Later, the company
announced it would create 10,000 new “metaverse-related” jobs. Zuckerberg said
on the company’s earnings call this week that the hardware division would
become a new line item in the company’s financial reports, and that investments
in it would shave $10 billion from its profits in 2020.