Facebook announced that its parent company, which also owns Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, has rebranded itself as Meta.
Per The Washington Post, “Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made the announcement at Connect, the company’s annual hardware event where it talks about products like the Portal video devices and Oculus headsets. The rebranding — pegged to a virtual world and hardware known as the “metaverse” — comes amid a broader effort to shift attention away from revelations that it knew its platform was causing a litany of social harms. The Facebook social network is not changing its name.”
Zuckerberg published a letter to the Meta website further detailing the changes to the company and plans for the “metaverse.”
In part, he writes, “The defining quality of the metaverse will be a feeling of presence — like you are right there with another person or in another place…In the metaverse, you’ll be able to do almost anything you can imagine — get together with friends and family, work, learn, play, shop, create — as well as completely new experiences that don’t really fit how we think about computers or phones today.”
Zuckerberg adds, “The last five years have been humbling for me and our company in many ways. One of the main lessons I’ve learned is that building products people love isn’t enough…From now on, we will be metaverse-first, not Facebook-first. That means that over time you won’t need a Facebook account to use our other services. As our new brand starts showing up in our products, I hope people around the world come to know the Meta brand and the future we stand for.”
Understandably, news like this led many to troll this Meta move by Facebook, which has been facing intense scrutiny lately following many whistleblower revelations about the company, including how the company chose to not stop the spread of misinformation in favor of profits and that it knows the negative impact Instagram has on teen.
Here are some of the best reactions to Meta.
