Yesternight, Facebook changed its parent company name to “Meta”.
According to Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of META, the tech giant tries to move past being a scandal-plagued social network to its virtual reality vision for the future.
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — which are used by billions around the world — will keep their names under the rebranding critics have called an effort to distract from the platform’s dysfunction.
“We’ve learned a lot from struggling with social issues and living under closed platforms, and now it is time to take everything that we’ve learned and help build the next chapter. I am proud to announce that starting today, our company is now Meta. Our mission remains the same, still about bringing people together, our apps and their brands, they’re not changing,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during an annual developers conference.
Facebook has been facing backlash after their selective use of AI and censoring of critics and banning their accounts.
According to The Real Facebook Oversight Board, an cativist group said the platform is harming democracy while spreading disinformation and hate.
“Their meaningless name change should not distract from the investigation, regulation and real, independent oversight needed to hold Facebook accountable,” the group said in a statement.
Facebook has been battling one of its most serious crises ever since former employee Frances Haugen leaked reams of internal studies showing executives knew of their sites’ potential for harm, prompting a renewed US push for regulation.
Mark Zuckerberg has been blamed alongside his platform for bending to state censors after the leak highlighted how the site has stoked anger in the name of keeping users engaged.
Facebook noted in a filing that from September “it became subject to government investigations and requests” relating to the documents leaked to lawmakers and regulators.
The company told AFP it issued on Tuesday to employees a “legal hold,” which is an instruction to preserve documents and communications because it faces inquiries from authorities.
“Good faith criticism helps us get better, but my view is that what we are seeing is a coordinated effort to selectively use leaked documents to paint a false picture of our company,” Zuckerberg said in an earnings call on Monday.
Is META another Facebook clone?
Meta-verse is not a Facebook original creation but rather another clone from the falling giant.
In the recent past, Facebook tried to clone their competitors who refuse to bow to their buyout demands.
The metaverse is, in fact, the stuff of science-fiction: the term was coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel “Snow Crash,” in which people don virtual reality headsets to interact inside a game-like digital world.
Google rebranded itself as Alphabet in a corporate reconfiguration in 2015, but the online search and ad powerhouse remains its defining unit despite other operations such as Waymo self-driving cars and Verily life sciences.
