Facebook Rebrands its Identity as Meta!
Facebook has changed its corporate name to Meta as a part of its major rebranding initiative. The company hopes that this initiative will better encapsulate the larger ‘metaverse’ that it is currently engaged in. With Facebook being embroiled in multiple controversies, primarily centered around privacy issues such as the likes of Cambridge Analytica data breach debacle, the project hopes to use its in-house news feed as a platform to revamp its image, and shift the toxicity that is otherwise sure to spill over company’s non-app offerings.
While the explanation for this rebranding initiative is to accommodate non-app products of the company, it can clearly be seen why looking at the timing of this initiative. Only today, The Washington Post reported that Facebook withheld important information about vaccine misinformation from policy makers during the pandemic.
Moreover, it aims to keep its CEO out of major controversies, and use the news feed as a PR tool. As a result, we can already see a shift in how Facebook executives have started using the platform to help avoid negative associations with them or Facebook. For example, Mark Zuckerberg has been surprisingly more active on the platform lately posting ‘personal’ stories like playing with his kid , or talking about their company hardware.
An ex-employee had only recently leaked internal documents that, among other things, claims how Facebook did nothing in spite of knowing that Instagram harmed teenage mental health, and had been complacent in monitoring hate speech from its platforms outside the US.
Zuckerberg, in his statement, says that the parent company was named ‘Meta’ because it means ‘beyond’ in Greek. What can be ironically gleaned within this explanation is that the name change seems to reflect on his desire to move ‘beyond’ a brand that has become toxic. That said, it is yet to be seen whether this will have any effect. After all, no one calls any of Google’s products and services as Alphabet’s.
