It's official now. The social networking parent company behind Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus has a new name after 17 years of being known as Facebook.
Meta is the new name for Facebook's corporate entity.
Mark Zuckerberg, the company's founder, announced the change at the company's AR/VR-focused Connect event, saying that the new title captured more of the company's core ambition: to build the metaverse.
“To reflect who we are and what we hope to build, I am proud to announce that starting today, our company is now Meta. Our mission remains the same — it’s still about bringing people together. Our apps and our brands — they’re not changing either,” said Zuckerberg. “From now on, we’re going to be metaverse-first, not Facebook-first,” he added further.
Facebook has faced 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 mistakes the company has made in responsibly building out its platform over the years.
Facebook had been laying the groundwork for this change for months, ostensibly to distance its core branding from the constant negative headlines surrounding its most popular product, which has been a lightning rod for consumer angst.
In July, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated in Verge’s profile that the company was betting everything on the metaverse. It was a surprise announcement for the trillion-dollar company, owing to the fact that, while Facebook has spent a lot of money and effort on virtual reality hardware, its social VR products have largely been short-lived failures, and the company had said almost nothing about its beta Horizons social platform since announcing it more than a year and a half ago.
