Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Thursday that the parent company behind the social media giant, as well as Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus, will now be known as Meta.
“We are a company that builds technology to connect,” Zuckerberg said at the company’s annual “Connect” event. “Together, we can finally put people at the center of our technology. And together, we can unlock a massively bigger creator economy.”
“To reflect who we are and what we hope to build, I am proud to announce that, starting today, our company is now Meta,” Zuckerberg, pegging the name change to its “metaverse” initiative, encompassing the company’s push toward virtual reality. “Our mission remains the same: It’s still about bringing people together.”
The name of the social media app Facebook will not change, and the corporate structure of the company will remain the same. The company will start trading under the stock symbol MVRS starting Dec. 1.
“Our apps and our brands, they’re not changing either,” he added. “From now on, we’re going to be metaverse-first, not Facebook-first.”
In explaining the rebrand, Zuckerberg said the name “Facebook” just doesn’t encompass everything the company does any more. In addition to its primary social network, that now includes Instagram, Messenger, its Quest VR headset, its Horizon VR platform and more.
“Today we are seen as a social media company,” Zuckerberg said. “But in our DNA we are a company that builds technology to connect people.”
Just as smartphones replaced desktop computers, Zuckerberg is betting that the metaverse will be the next way people will interact with computers — and each other.
Skeptics point out that it also appears to be an attempt to change the subject from the Facebook Papers, a leaked document trove that has revealed the ways Facebook ignored internal reports and warnings of the harms its social network created or magnified across the world.
While largely dismissing revelations from the the Facebook Papers as unfair criticism, Zuckerberg has focused on building a virtual environment you can go inside of instead of just looking at on a screen.
Zuckerberg says he expects the metaverse to reach a billion people within the next decade. The metaverse, he says, will be a place people will be able to interact, work and create products and content in what he hopes will be a new ecosystem that creates “millions” of jobs for creators.
The announcement comes amid an existential crisis for Facebook as leaked documents have exposed that the company knew about the harms its products cause but often ignored its own researchers and workers trying to fix them.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
