Facebook Changes Name To Meta As Part Of Rebrand

Facebook has announced a name change as part of a rebrand that focuses on a shared virtual environment that it bets will be the next big computing platform or more concisely “meta verse”.

Hoping to move beyond its past as solely a social media platform CEO Mark Zuckerberg, spoke at the company’s live-streamed virtual and augmented reality conference saying the new name reflected its ambitions going forward.

“We are a company that builds technology to connect,” Zuckerberg said. “Together, we can finally put people at the center of our technology. And together, we can unlock a massively bigger creator economy.”

“Right now, our brand is so tightly linked to one product that it can’t possibly represent everything that we’re doing today, let alone in the future.”

Facebook has been under intense scrutiny for months now following damning internal documents provided to the Wall Street Journal by whistleblower Frances Haugen.

Antitrust regulators have pushed for the company to be broken up, as public trust in the social media platform hits new lows.

Facebook’s Instagram platform took the brunt of the attack being highlighted as a toxic place for teenagers, especially girls.

The metaverse is a concept coined in the 1992 sci-fi novel Snow Crash to describe a kind of three-dimensional virtual reality version of the internet where people are present as avatars and move through a digital representation of the real world.

Instead of being on a computer, people in a metaverse might use a headset to enter a virtual world connecting all sorts of digital environments. 

It is hoped the virtual world could be used for practically anything from work, play and concerts, to socialising with friends and family.

Facebook said it intends to start trading it shares under the new stock ticker MVRS from 1 December.