Facebook changes its name: Facebook announced on Thursday that it had changed its name to Meta , reports the Washington Post . Mark Zuckerberg announced his company’s new name at Connect’s annual conference.
The name change is part of a strategic corporate change that no longer wants to be known solely on social media. The company decided to re-brand after a wave of criticism related to the disclosure of internal documents by former employees.
The company changes its name, but the name of the portal remains
During today’s conference, Zuckerberg explained that the company aims to build a meta-verse, i.e. a virtual extension of physical reality. It is about building a new, digital reality that is to enable interaction in a 3D environment.
“We are at the beginning of the next chapter for the Internet, and this is another chapter for our company as well,” Mark Zuckerberg wrote in an official statement on his Facebook profile here:
Users will be able to use devices designed to communicate and navigate in the virtual world. The rebranded Facebook social network will become one of the many products of the parent company overseeing groups such as Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus and other applications.
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Facebook is not the first Silicon Valley company to change its name completely. Earlier, in 2015, Google changed the name of its parent company to Alphabet. Snapchst changed its name as well, becoming Snap Inc.
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Former Facebook manager Frances Haugen had released documents showing that the company was aware of the negative impact of social media on people and society, but did not want to change it. She said the company had often set hate news or information to reach a wider audience, because it helped to generate more profits.
Source: Washington Post