Facebook Is Going Meta
From Wall Street to Main Street to Capitol Hill, everyone is mad at Facebook. The company has been under fire since a trove of leaked internal documents shed light on its struggles to prevent real-world harm, from political unrest to teen suicides. Everyone has something to say about Facebook, and almost none of it is good. So now Mark Zuckerberg would like you to talk about something else.
“Today, we're seen as a social media company, but in our DNA we are a company that builds technology to connect people,” Zuckerberg said at the company's Connect conference on Thursday morning, where he unveiled a series of new products and ambitions around the metaverse. “It is time for us to adopt a new company brand to encompass everything that we do, to reflect who we are, and what we hope to build.” Then he announced a new name for the company: not Facebook, but Meta.
Facebook is one of the most iconic brands in the world, and that used to suit Zuckerberg just fine. In 2019, he slapped the Facebook name on his company’s other products—Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Oculus—to remind people that Facebook is not just Facebook, but “a family of apps.” But now, Zuckerberg said on Thursday, “our brand is so tightly linked to one product that it can't possibly represent everything we're doing today, let alone in the future.” The new name is meant to signal that future: one beyond social media, and beyond all the bad news.
