Facebook changes company name to Meta starting Thursday

Facebook has now rebranded as Meta. It’s official. The social network platform that owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus has changed its name after 17 years as Facebook.

Mark Zuckerberg announced the title change at the company’s AR/VR-centric Connect event. He said it more accurately captured what Facebook was trying to do: build the metaverse.

Facebook’s name change comes at a good time for the company, which has seen a significant backlash after an employee leaked a cache of documents to the press detailing intentional mistakes made by the social network over the years.

A recent Facebook change seems to be intended to move its core branding away from the constant negative attention surrounding its most popular product, known as a lightning rod among consumers.

There was a great deal of press coverage in August related to a Facebook VR app. The small VR app was a surprise topic of conversation on Zuckerberg’s morning shows.

Creating an alliance between a product associated with huge problems and its core business is an understandable move for Facebook, but changing its name to Meta will require the company to align its brand with a product that could be years from relevance and will likely face many failures.

The Facebook metaverse has only a few thousand users at best, while Facebook has 2.5 billion users.

Distancing the company’s primary business from a product connected with the biggest amount of difficulties isn’t shocking in the end, but moving

In colloquial terms, most people still refer to anything having to do with Google, its subsidiaries, or Alphabet in general as ‘Google.’

As Facebook is nearing three billion monthly active users and has spent almost two decades building its brand, it can probably expect similar treatment.