Facebook renames itself ‘Meta’ amid controversy

SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook on Thursday announced its rebranding itself as Meta to reflect the company’s focus on building the metaverse, a virtual world where people work, play, learn and connect with their friends and family.

Meta will be a new parent company that will preside over Facebook and its services including photo app Instagram, WhatsApp and its virtual and augmented reality efforts.  The change comes with a new logo designed like an infinity-shaped symbol, slightly askew, almost like a pretzel.

Company CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he expects the metaverse to reach a billion people within the next decade. The metaverse, he said, will be a place people will be able to interact, work and create products and content in what he hopes will be a new ecosystem that creates “millions” of jobs for creators.

In explaining the rebrand, Zuckerberg said the name “Facebook” just doesn’t encompass “everything we do” any more. “Today we are seen as a social media company,” Zuckerberg said, adding, “But in our DNA we are a company that builds technology to connect people.”

The announcement comes amid an existential crisis for Facebook. It faces legislative and regulatory scrutiny in many parts of the world following revelations in the Facebook Papers.

The widely-rumored rebranding underscores how Facebook, founded in 2004, has grown beyond social networking. Facebook owns virtual reality headset maker Oculus, built Portal video chat devices and teamed up with Ray-Ban to release its first pair of smart glasses this year.

It’s also the most high-profile rebranding of a tech company since 2015 when Google formed its parent company Alphabet. Forming a new parent company, though, doesn’t fix Facebook’s seemingly endless list of problems.

For years, the company has dealt with criticism that it doesn’t do enough to safeguard privacy, combat hate speech and stop the spread of misinformation.

Now the social network is grappling with more allegations that it puts profits over user safety after former Facebook product manager turned whistleblower Frances Haugen leaked internal research to Congress and the US Securities and Exchange Commission.