Facebook users were yesterday bombarded with news from FaceBook that the company was going through a major rebrand that will now see it called Meta.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company will be called “Meta” to reflect the company’s focus on building a larger virtual world beyond the Facebook platform.

This comes at a time when the social networking giant has faced a lot of backlash from individuals and governments regarding its operations and most specifically the use of customers’ data.

A Facebook ex-employee, Frances Haugen, released a series of documents painting the company negatively by accusing it of putting profits before people.

Some of the allegations from the leaked documents indicated that Facebook was aware of the dangers the platform Instagram was posing to teenagers’ mental health but did not come forth with those findings.

This is seen to have necessitated the rebrand but the CEO in his statement said that the rebrand was necessary as the current brand was not representative of what the company was doing in totality.

“To reflect who we are and the future we hope to build, I’m proud to share that our company is now Meta. Our mission remains the same — it’s still about bringing people together. Our apps and their brands aren’t changing either.

We’re still the company that designs technology around people. But all of our products, including our apps, now share a new vision: to help bring the metaverse to life. And now we have a name that reflects the breadth of what we do.”

Just a couple of weeks ago, the social media platform associated with Zuckerberg faced a global outage that lasted almost six hours.

Facebook issued a statement that said, “configuration changes on the backbone routers that co-ordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication”. This had a “cascading effect… bringing our services to a halt”.

According to the Washington Post, Facebook’s interest in the metaverse is “part of a broader push to rehabilitate the company’s reputation with policymakers and reposition Facebook to shape the regulation of next-wave Internet technologies.”

“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. 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.”

I guess it’s a wait-and-see scenario if Facebook will live up to its new name and mandate.

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