The Morning After: Facebook is now called Meta
While Facebook the social network is still Facebook, the overarching company that it created is now called Meta. Facebook Inc. is changing its name in order to distinguish its myriad parts from the social network, which has an increasingly poor reputation pretty much everywhere. Particularly in the last few weeks.
While the company hopes it’ll offer some degree of distraction from current sentiment (and political focus), it’s not going to stop people talking about Facebook Meta.
Mark Zuckerberg announced the new name during his keynote for the company’s Connect event. He said: “From now on, we’re going to be metaverse-first, not Facebook first.”
The change appears very similar to how Google, the search and tech part, was bundled inside Alphabet — a bigger company to contain all the other parts.
The timing is, perhaps, even odder. The Facebook Papers — internal documents detailing the social network’s major failings and issues — encompassing misinformation, hate speech and censorship, are now public knowledge. Is this a distraction or Facebook wilfully forcing its own transformation at a time when most of us are more interested in how it’s going to fix its current state.
If I don’t want to use Facebook — why would I want …read more
