Tech giant Facebook Inc. announced on Thursday, October 28 that the company has re-branded itself by adopting a new name — Meta.
Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the same during the Facebook Connect augmented and virtual reality conference. The rebrand comes amidst the growing criticism and mounting allegations against the company for its algorithmic decisions and neglect of the harms of Facebook on its users for profit.
“Today we are seen as a social media company, but in our DNA we are a company that builds technology to connect people,” said Zuckerberg during the conference, adding that metaverse is next on the horizon just as social networking was when Facebook first began.
The company also announced that the new name will mark a change in its stock ticket from FB to MVRS starting from December 1. The name change, however, will not reflect a change in Facebook’s social media service and app but the platform will now be placed under the parent company Meta which will also oversee Facebook’s other entities such as Whatsapp, Instagram, Oculus, among others.
Meta has been gearing up for the name change and expansion into the metaverse market since earlier this summer when the company announced the formation of a dedicated metaverse team in July.
Two months later, the company also shared plans to promote its current head of AR and VR, Andrew Bosworth, to the position of Chief Technology Officer in 2022. The company also stated this week that it is estimated to spend around $10 billion over the next year to develop the technological infrastructure required in building the metaverse.
Meta expects metaverse to reach a billion people within the next decade, hosting hundreds of billions of digital commerce and supporting livelihood for millions of digital creators and developers. “We believe the metaverse will be the successor to the mobile internet,” Zuckerberg said.