MENLO PARK, Calif. — Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Thursday that his company will rebrand itself as Meta as it focuses on its virtual-reality vision for the future.
It doesn’t appear the change will affect consumers that much, though. The company’s corporate name will be Meta, while its flagship social networking site will keep the Facebook name, The Washington Post reports. That’s similar to how Google’s parent company name is Alphabet.
Zuckerberg announced the name change at Connect, the company’s annual conference about augmented reality and virtual reality products. He said it will bring the business’ apps and technologies under one brand.
Zuckerberg said in a “founders letter” that all of the company’s products, including its apps, now share a new vision, to help bring the “metaverse” to life. He added that the new name reflects that.
“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,” said Zuckerberg. “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.”
Along with a new name, the company has a new logo as well: the “Meta symbol.” The blue image appears to be a play on the infinity symbol.
“The Meta symbol was designed to dynamically live in the metaverse — where you can move through it and around it,” explained the company. “It can take on infinite textures, colors and movement, capturing the creativity and imagination of a 3D world. It was also important that the symbol take on a blue gradient and pull in the color of our core products, connecting our future to our company’s origins.”
Many have pointed out that the new brand appears to be an attempt to change the subject from the Facebook Papers, a trove of documents that have recently revealed the many ways the company ignored internal reports and warnings about how its social platforms have harmed people across the world.