The social media site formerly known as Facebook? Continuing to come under scrutiny over its business practices, reports are emerging that the company plans on rebranding with a new name focused on the metaverse.
Facebook planning to make a name change next week
According to The Verge, Facebook’s Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, who co-founded the social media network in 2004, is expected to discuss the name change at the company’s Connect conference on Oct. 28.
The company as a whole, which is comprised of billion-user brands Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, will allegedly undergo the name change. This is similar to what Google did in its restructuring under the parent name of Alphabet Inc.
According to reports, the original Facebook service and app may remain unchanged in their branding, but it will exist under a renamed parent company.
Bloomberg reached out for comment, but a spokesperson from Facebook said the company doesn’t “comment on rumor or speculation.”
Name change comes following whistleblower and congressional testimony
The announcement of a potential name change comes only weeks after former employee, Frances Haugen, turned whistleblower, leaked a trove of damning internal documents to The Wall Street Journal, and then later testified about them before Congress.
Facebook eyes the metaverse
In Internet terms, “metaverse” refers to a future iteration of the Internet that is made up of shared, persistent, 3D virtual spaces that are linked into a perceived virtual universe.
“In the coming years, I expect people will transition from seeing us primarily as a social media company to seeing us as a metaverse company,” Zuckerberg said in July. “In many ways the metaverse is the ultimate expression of social technology.”
Facebook has invested heavily in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). In 2014, Facebook acquired Oculus, a company that produces virtual reality headsets, for $2.3 billion in cash and stock.
Facebook has over 10,000 employees involved in building consumer hardware such as the AR glasses that Zuckerberg believes will eventually be as ubiquitous as smartphones, according to The Verge.
Twitter CEO Dorsey calls Zuckerberg’s metaverse plan dystopian
A Twitter user, udiverse21, posted about Facebook becoming a “metaverse,” writing: “the word “metaverse” was coined byneal stephenson in the book “snowcrash” and it originally described a virtual world owned by corporations where end users were treated as citizens in a dystopian corporate dictatorship…what if neal was right?”
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey replied: “He was.”
