Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Thursday that the company has changed its name to Meta, but people aren't too impressed with the rebrand.
The company revealed the rebrand on Thursday at its Connect event, and the push towards the virtual world of the “metaverse” was at the forefront of the livestream. We should point out that the social media network Facebook will not be changing its name, but rather the parent company, similar to when Google named its paret company Alphabet.
"From now on, we’re going to be the metaverse first. Not Facebook first,” Zuckerberg said on Thursday. “Facebook is one of the most used products in the world. But increasingly, it doesn’t encompass everything that we do. Right now, our brand is so tightly linked to one product that it can’t possibly represent everything we are doing.”
The announcement arrives at a tumultuous time for the company, which has faced heavy criticism for its failure to prevent the rise of fake news and hateful content across its platforms, which also include Instagram and WhatsApp.
Damaging insights and internal documents from the social media network have flooded in as of late, and it would appear as though Facebook was more than aware that its basic functionality was allowing further propagation of hate speech online. Zuckerberg’s public comments are in stark contrast with some of these internal documents, and research shows that Facebook was only removing “less than 5 percent” of the hateful content on the platform.
As with all things Facebook and Zuckerberg-related, people used the announcement as an opportunity to take some jabs at the company, and of course, get off some jokes. Even Twitter founder Jack Dorsey chimed in. Check out some of the more notable reactions to the big announcement below.
