Facebook rebrands as Meta
Company will now be 'metaverse-first, not Facebook-first' says Zuckerberg
Facebook is to rebrand as Meta, turning its focus away from social media and towards what it calls the metaverse, or ‘embodied internet', a world of multichannel connectivity and virtual and augmented reality.
The move, which was widely expected after stories of an imminent renaming circulated last week, was announced on Thursday by the company in its Q3 earnings report and by Mark Zuckerberg in a blog post.
In its earnings report, the company explains that from the next quarter it will divide into two segments, with each reporting its own financial results. Family of Apps (FoA) will include Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp and other services, while Facebook Reality Labs (FRL), will concern "augmented and virtual reality related consumer hardware, software and content".
Explaining the move, Zuckerberg says: "Right now our brand is so tightly linked to one product that it can't possibly represent everything we're doing today, let alone in the future. Over time, I hope we are seen as a metaverse company, and I want to anchor our work and our identity on what we're building towards."
He adds that the company will now be "metaverse-first, not Facebook-first."
The move comes as the company is facing unprecedented criticism following the leaks and revelations of whistleblower Frances Haugen, who accused the company of "prioritising profit over safety", and will be seen by many critics as being an effort to deflect attention away from these issues.
Zuckerberg's blog mentions none of the company's woes, although in a section headed 'Who We Are' he does speak vaguely of learning from "struggling with difficult social issues".
Instead, he waxes lyrical about the potential of the metaverse where people can ‘teleport' as holograms to the office or a friend's house: "Feeling truly present with another person is the ultimate dream of social technology."
Zuckerberg namechecks the importance of privacy and safety, open standards and interoperability in the metaverse, as well as "new forms of governance", but with no detail. More revealing, perhaps, is the mention, in the same paragraph, of "supporting crypto and NFT projects in the community." Facebook has been trying to integrate payments into its platform for some time now, like China's Tencent has with WeChat Pay, although its Libra cryptocurrency (rebranded Diem) has yet to make headway due to regulatory concerns expressed by many countries. There can be little doubt that the company would want its metaverse to have its own currency.
Facebook's restructuring and rebranding is echoes a similar move in 2025 by Google, when the eponymous search engine became one of a range of products (albeit by far the largest and most lucrative) under the umbrella of newly formed holding company Alphabet.
Facebook recently said it was looking to hire 10,000 people in Europe to develop the metaverse, an announcement that was met with shock by Haugen who said the resources Facebook puts into stopping disinformation, hate speech and algorithmic harms caused by algorithms tuned to maximise attention time were inadequate.
"Do you know what we could have done with safety if we'd had 10,000 more engineers?' it would have been amazing," Haugen, who had worked Facebook's civic integrity team, told a UK parliamentary select committee on Monday.