Social media group: Facebook is renamed Meta

The Facebook group is giving itself a new name: The parent company of all services will be called Meta in the future. The name Facebook can no longer reflect the entire range of products, said CEO Zuckerberg.

The online network Facebook will continue to be called that, but the umbrella company is renaming itself to Meta, announced Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. With the new name he wants to direct the focus to the new virtual environment “Metaverse”, in which he sees the future of digital communication – and also of his company.

This should lead the group more strongly out of the shadow of its original and so far most important platform Facebook. In addition to Instagram, the company group also includes the WhatsApp and Messenger chat apps. “Today we are seen as a social media company, but at heart we are a company that connects people,” said Zuckerberg. The name Facebook was no longer able to reflect the entire range of products offered by the group.

Bet on virtual reality

In the “Metaverse”, according to the presentation of the 37-year-old Facebook founder, physical and digital worlds will come together. On the one hand, Zuckerberg relies on virtual reality (VR), in which users can immerse themselves in digital worlds with special glasses on their heads. The VR company Oculus also belongs to the Facebook group.

The Facebook founder also sees so-called augmented reality (AR) as a “metaverse” component, in which digital content is faded into the real environment for the viewer on displays or with the help of projector glasses. “We believe that the ‘Metaverse’ will be the successor to the mobile Internet,” emphasized Zuckerberg. Facebook is expanding its virtual worlds under the name Horizon and hopes to have one billion users by 2030 to conduct several hundred million dollars in business.

Revelations and allegations

With the announcement of the renaming, however, the company is also distracting from numerous problems in recent times. The internet giant has been accused for some time of not taking sufficient action against the spread of hate messages and bullying on its platforms,

The group has come under heavy pressure again in recent weeks from internal documents that were made public by a former employee. Frances Haugen accused her former employer of putting its own profits above the safety of its users and the common good. Facebook firmly denied the allegations.

Google also renamed itself

Facebook isn’t the first Silicon Valley corporation to change its company name to signal that the company’s direction has expanded. In 2015, for example, Google put a new holding company called Alphabet over the group. The Internet company wanted to signal that it not only operates a search engine and a cloud business, but also has ambitions for driverless cars, health solutions and other high-tech areas.

However, almost all of Alphabet’s revenue is still generated by Google, and the bottom line is that the other companies are only posting losses. Google boss Sundar Pichai is now also at the top of the alphabet.