Well, it’s official. After 17 years of being called Facebook, the social networking parent company behind Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus feature a new name.
Facebook’s corporate entity is now Meta.
Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg announced the change at the company’s AR/VR-focused Connect event, sharing that the new title captured more of the company’s core ambition: to create the metaverse.
“To reflect who we are and what we hope to create, I'm proud to announce that starting today, our company is now Meta. Our mission remains an equivalent — it’s still about bringing people together. Our apps and our brands — they’re not changing either,” Zuckerberg said. “From now on, we’re getting to be metaverse-first, not Facebook-first.”
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 remodeled the years in building out its platform responsibly. Facebook had been laying the groundwork for this alteration for months, seemingly in an attempt to maneuver its core branding beyond the relentlessly negative headlines surrounding its most popular product, which has been a lightning rod for angst among consumers.
In July, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced during a Verge profile that Facebook was betting it all on the metaverse. It was a surprise announcement for the trillion-dollar company, mainly because while Facebook has spent many money and energy on computer game 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 quite a year-and-a-half earlier.
In August, Facebook organized a strangely large press strong-arm a VR app designed to let people take meetings in VR. Zuckerberg hit the morning shows and dedicated a surprising amount of effort toward showcasing the tiny VR app.
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 rent a whopping 10,000 employees in the EU specifically to create out their metaverse platform.
Last week, a story within the Verge floated that Facebook was mulling a reputation change to their corporate entity.
Ultimately, distancing the company’s core business from a product related to the foremost problems is an unsurprising move for them, but changing its name to Meta would require Facebook to align its core brand with a product that would be years from relevance and will encounter many failures on the thanks to potential mainstream success. Facebook still has 2.5 billion users, while their metaverse products likely have a couple of thousand users, at most.
A major name change from one of tech’s biggest companies isn’t without precedent. In 2015, Google unrolled a replacement corporate structure of its own, creating a parent company referred to as Alphabet. 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. 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.
While Google wasn’t trying to place distance between itself and its own name, Facebook has very different reasons for a rebrand. 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 just 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.
Facebook is additionally arguably under more regulatory scrutiny at the instant than the other company within the tech industry. 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.
During a Senate hearing last week with TikTok, Snap, and YouTube, each social media company scrambled to explicitly contrast their own business practices with Facebook. YouTube posited that it didn’t “prioritize profits over safety.” Snap pointed to its own specialize in ephemeral conversations, while TikTok argued that it thinks carefully about the wellbeing of teenage users. But the efforts by Facebook’s peers seemed to be vain.
“Being different from Facebook isn't a defense,” Senator Richard Blumenthal said. “That bar is in the gutter.”
