On Thursday, Facebook announced that it would change its corporate name to Meta as a part of a strategic shift to emphasize the company's efforts to shift gears away from being known as just a social media company, which is currently embroiled in multiple controversies.
At the company's Connect event, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company's new name would be Meta. We are a company that builds technology to connect. Together, we can finally put people at the center of our technology. And together, we can unlock a massively bigger creator economy, he said.
Zuckerberg owns the Twitter handle @meta (whose tweets are protected as of this writing) and meta.com, which now redirects to a welcome page on Facebook that outlines the changes.
The new changes come after a series of negative stories about Facebook, based on documents leaked by an ex-employee who has accused the company of putting profits over safety.
Last week, the company's critics reacted to leaked reports on Facebook's rebranding plans, terming the exercise as a distraction from its recent scandals and controversy.
An activist group calling itself The Real Facebook Oversight Board has warned that major industries like oil and tobacco had rebranded to deflect attention from their problems.
Facebook thinks that a rebrand can help them change the subject, the group said last week. They added that the real issue was the need for oversight and regulation.
Meanwhile, the company unveiled a new sign at its headquarters in Menlo Park, California, replacing its thumbs-up Like logo with a blue infinity shape.
The company intends to start trading its shares under the new stock ticker MVRS from December 1st.