So, on October 28, 2021, Mark Zuckerberg announced the new name as Meta. The Meta owners believe the Metaverse is the next evolution in social technology.Īlso, they think their range of products has outgrown their Facebook brand, hence the call for rebranding. It summarizes the company’s aim to integrate the physical and digital world using virtual and augmented realities. This is the bold statement on Facebook’s website. “That bar is in the gutter.Let’s get an insight into the Meta logo and some history behind the social technology. “Being different from Facebook is not a defense,” Senator Richard Blumenthal said.
But the efforts by Facebook’s peers appeared to be in vain. YouTube posited that it didn’t “prioritize profits over safety.” Snap pointed to its own focus on ephemeral conversations, while TikTok argued that it thinks carefully about the wellbeing of teen users. In Congress, where lawmakers seldom agree on anything, Republicans and Democrats have united in their shared distaste for the company’s unfettered growth, cutthroat business tactics and concerns over Instagram’s detrimental effects on teen mental health.ĭuring a Senate hearing last week with TikTok, Snap and YouTube, each social media company scrambled to explicitly contrast their own business practices with Facebook. The company’s business continues to soar, but its brand has taken a beating in recent years, from Russian election disinformation in 2016, to major privacy lapses like the Cambridge Analytica scandal and now the flurry of ongoing revelations from Frances Haugen, a former member of Facebook’s civic integrity team turned Facebook whistleblower.įacebook is also arguably under more regulatory scrutiny at the moment than any other company in the tech industry. While Google wasn’t trying to put distance between itself and its own name, Facebook has very different reasons for a rebrand. After almost two decades of building its brand and growing its products to almost three billion monthly users, Facebook can probably expect the same treatment. Google remains a subsidiary of Alphabet, but colloquially most people still call anything having to do with the company or its subsidiaries “Google,” for better or worse. In 2015, Google rolled out a new corporate structure of its own, creating a parent company known as Alphabet. Facebook still has 2.5 billion users, while their metaverse products likely have a few thousand users, at most.Ī major name change from one of tech’s biggest companies isn’t without precedent. Ultimately, distancing the company’s core business from a product associated with the most problems is an unsurprising move for them, but changing its name to Meta will require Facebook to align its core brand with a product that could be years from relevancy and could encounter many failures on the way to potential mainstream success. Last week, a story in The Verge floated that Facebook was mulling a name change to their corporate entity. In September, in a blog post called “Building the Metaverse Responsibly,” Facebook announced a $50 million fund dedicated toward investment in research “to ensure these products are developed responsibly.” This month, Facebook announced a smaller $10 million creator fund for developers on its nascent Horizon Worlds platform, and also detailed that it planned to hire a whopping 10,000 employees in the EU specifically to build out their metaverse platform. Zuckerberg hit the morning shows and dedicated a surprising amount of effort toward showcasing the small VR app. In August, Facebook organized an unusually large press push around a VR app designed to let people take meetings in VR. It was a surprise announcement for the trillion-dollar company, mainly because while Facebook has spent plenty of money and effort on virtual reality hardware, its social VR products have largely been short-lived failures and it had said barely anything about its beta Horizons social platform since announcing it more than a year-and-a-half earlier. In July, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a Verge profile that Facebook was betting it all on the metaverse.
Facebook had been laying the groundwork for this change for months, seemingly in an effort to move its core branding further from the relentless negative headlines surrounding its most popular product, which has been a lightning rod for angst among consumers. The name change comes at a… convenient time for Facebook, which has seen a sustained backlash to its brand, particularly in recent weeks after a former employee leaked a trove of documents to the media and government bodies detailing the missteps Facebook has made over the years in building out its platform responsibly. Company formerly known as Facebook unceremoniously kills off ‘Oculus’ brand
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