Facebook\u00a0chief Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday announced the parent company\u2019s name is being changed to \u201cMeta\u201d to represent a future beyond just its troubled social network.<\/p>\n
The new handle comes as the social media giant tries to fend off one its worst crises yet and pivot to its ambitions for the \u201cmetaverse\u201d virtual reality version of the internet that the tech giant sees as the future.<\/span><\/p>\n Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp will keep their names under the rebranding.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve learned a lot from struggling with social issues and living under closed platforms, and now it is time to take everything that we\u2019ve learned and help build the next chapter,\u201d Zuckerberg said during an annual developers conference.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI am proud to announce that starting today, our company is now Meta. Our mission remains the same, still about bringing people together, our apps and their brands, they\u2019re not changing,\u201d he added.<\/span><\/p>\n Facebook\u00a0critics pounced last week on a report that leaked the rebranding plans, arguing the company was aiming to distract from recent scandals and controversy.<\/span><\/p>\n An activist group calling itself The Real\u00a0Facebook\u00a0Oversight Board has warned that major industries like oil and tobacco had rebranded to \u201cdeflect attention\u201d from their problems.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cFacebook\u00a0thinks that a rebrand can help them change the subject,\u201d the group said last week, adding the \u201creal issue\u201d was the need for oversight and regulation.<\/span><\/p>\n Facebook\u00a0has just announced plans to hire 10,000 people in the European Union to build the \u201cmetaverse,\u201d with Zuckerberg emerging as a leading promoter of the concept.<\/span><\/p>\n (AFP)<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Facebook\u00a0chief Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday announced the parent company\u2019s name is being changed to \u201cMeta\u201d to represent a future beyond just its troubled social network. The new handle comes as the social media giant tries to fend off one its worst crises yet and pivot to its ambitions for the \u201cmetaverse\u201d virtual reality version of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5813,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2456,2],"tags":[935,1401,3551,1775],"class_list":["post-5812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","category-news","tag-facebook","tag-mark-zuckerberg","tag-meta","tag-social-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5812"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5812"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5812\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5814,"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5812\/revisions\/5814"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}