Facebook Changes Its Name to Meta

On Thursday, at Facebook’s annual developer-focused Connect conference, keynote speaker and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stage—a virtual home—to announce the company’s latest update, along with a name change reflecting its new ambitions. The new name? Meta. But what about the Facebook name, originally derived from its first iteration, FaceMash, in 2003? “Increasingly it just doesn’t encompass everything we do,” said Zuckerberg. “But right now our brand is so tightly linked to one product that it can’t possibly represent everything we’re doing today or in the future…I want to anchor our identity on what we’re building towards.” So, the parent company becomes Meta—though the social media app remains Facebook. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Meta, Facebook, and the many names associated with it still face the same issues they did moments before the announcement. In the past two months, Instagram has come under fire for severely impacting the self-esteem of younger users, especially those belonging to Generation Z. And leaked internal Facebook documents have shown the company was reluctant to do more to combat vaccine misinformation, the spread of fake news from white supremacist-supporting news outlets, and has devoted remarkably little resources to combatting the spread of harmful content in developing countries where Facebook is the dominant social network. Read More: A New Name Won’t Fix Facebook Despite the timing, the move helps to establish a clearer hierarchy within Zuckerberg’s ad-powered empire. It turns the social network into one of many products under the Meta parent company umbrella, including Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus, and places emphasis on future projects, making Facebook seem like a thing of the past. While the name change was the big finish on Meta’s keynote presentation, the majority of it focused on the company’s desire to establish what it calls a “metaverse,” an effort to unify the company’s existing brands (like Oculus) to create immersive virtual and mixed reality environments in which users can interact. “You’re going to be able to do almost anything you can imagine,” said Zuckerberg, who described the multiple ways people would interact in VR. Zuckerberg emphasized the metaverse’s immersive potential, in situations like family visits or office meetings. “Instead of looking at a screen, you’re going to be in these experiences,” he said.