Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg while delivering the keynote address during a virtual event on October 28, announced that Facebook will rebrand itself under a new name, Meta in an apparent effort to recast the company’s public image from battered social network and with a focus to building the next generation of online interaction known as “metaverse.”
Zuckerberg said “it’s time to overhaul the corporation’s identity to reflect its broader ambitions.
“It is time for us to adopt a new company brand to encompass everything that we do,” he said. “From now on, we’re going to be metaverse first, not Facebook first.”
Seventeen years after Zuckerberg founded Facebook in his Harvard University dorm room, the company’s brand has been badly dented by a succession of crises, from Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election to the Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal, which became public in 2018, to last month’s damaging revelations from former Facebook employee turned whistleblower Frances Haugen.
But even as the company has been pummeled by a wave of critical news coverage about its platforms’ harms, based on Haugen’s trove of internal documents, Zuckerberg has unapologetically kept his focus on the metaverse, describing it on Thursday as the company’s new “North Star.”
He says the metaverse is the next big computing platform to which people’s attention — and dollars — will shift in the coming years. And he wants the newly christened Meta to play a prime role in creating it and turning it into big business.
“Building our social media apps will always be an important focus for us. But 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,” Zuckerberg said.