The change from Facebook to Meta is indicative of an endeavour to discard what employees themselves regard as a noxious brand and that influences the discerning of their products. Recently, Mark Zuckerberg has provided the future not only of his brand but of the whole Internet. The so-called “Metaverse” intends to combine the real and the virtual world, enabling us to make our own identity and unite in chats, video calls, video games, and even concerts with our friends and family. All this provides special significance to the NFTs and virtual content connected with our account on any site.

Zuckerberg expounded that from now on, his brand was going to concentrate on making that idea a reality, and hence it was rational to change the name to better represent its aims: Facebook is now named Meta.

Why the change from Facebook to Meta?

But as disclosed by CNBC, according to internal sources, this is an alteration that the company’s employees would have requested to get rid of the baggage of the “Facebook” brand. Some employees even believe that Facebook was a “tax” that they had to suffer on their products, even though they were not relevant to the social network.

Is easy to see why. Every time we open Instagram, WhatsApp, or put on an Oculus device, we see the Facebook brand, which is growingly related to privacy scandals and with the worst of social networks. Recent revelations, in terms of leaked Facebook documents indicating important problems in content moderation, censorship, and human trafficking, have not contributed.

Ironically, the reason the Facebook brand emerged in those apps in the first place was that Zuckerberg sought to “clean it up” after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, relating it to brands liked by the community like Instagram or WhatsApp. That now operates against him, and he takes the risk of those brands terminating “messed up” by association. Instagram has injured the most from this, and its marketing part requested concessions such as making the Facebook brand smaller or even eliminating it, but their requests were not sanctioned.

Facebook, a noxious brand

Soon, Facebook will vanish from those sites and we will only see “Meta”; Facebook as a brand will go on to exist but sustained only in the social network and without emerging in the rest of the company’s products.

In other words, Facebook has become a noxious brand, and Zuckerberg has detached it so that it does not influence the rest. Although it appears exaggerated, this has already occurred at least once: at the onset of the year, when WhatsApp launched new references to Facebook in its terms of use. Although in practice they were not big modifications, the sole presence of the brand was sufficient for users to refuse them, because of the suspicions of spying and use of user data, against which WhatsApp has been combating all year.

According to unknown sources, Facebook had a similar problem with Facebook Portal, the smart speaker with a screen. Internal studies indicated that while branding it, Facebook decreased public confidence in the product. In the close future, the device’s name will be changed to the Meta Portal.

What has occurred?

After a lot of speculation, Facebook, the company that possesses platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, was renamed Meta on 28 October. CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the audience at the company’s annual Connect conference: “Right now, our brand is so closely connected to one product that it can’t probably reflect everything that we’re conducting today, much less in the future. Over time, I hope that we are considered as a metaverse company, and I want to support our work and identity on what we’re making onward.”

It is significant to mention that Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram will all be preserving their names. But the company that manufactures and sustains them will now be named Meta – identical to Google’s 2015 corporate restructuring into a parent company named Alphabet. Facebook (the company) even altered the logo outside its building on 28 October.

What is the Metaverse?

The name was selected to reverberate the pivotal product that Zuckerberg hopes Facebook – now Meta – will be shown by: the Metaverse, the name for a shared online 3D virtual space that many companies are eager to create as a sort of future version of the internet.

But it is in the future. Not now. The Metaverse revealed by the company in August is similar to The Sims or another immersive world: the 2003 video game Second Life.

Why is Zuckerberg doing this?

For one thing, Meta doesn’t seek to be referred to solely as a social media platform. “My misgiving is that this is about possessing the working system of the future, and Facebook’s adventure of being an app on other people’s – competitors’ – working systems.”

“They want to enchain others on their platforms instead of being enchained by others”

Meta did make unclear references to Apple in its declaration, saying it desired to refrain from a single company constricting what you can do and charging high fees, but Max Van Kleek at the University of Oxford is incredulous that Meta itself will take control over its metaverse.

“I suspect that they would abandon anything that might compromise their position as the absolute advertisement provider of the Metaverse, for example,” says Van Kleek.

Doesn’t Meta have greater things to worry about?

There has been an incessant drip of adverse stories following the publication of the Facebook Papers, internal documents asserting issues with the company, and leaks of the firm by whistleblower Frances Haugen. Some have analyzed the new name as a way to take away from this narrative.

What occurs if Meta triumphs?

One issue with Meta trying to be the sole company supporting the Metaverse is the pivotal effect it would have on our lives if its vision of the future becomes a reality. The company has grappled with failure in the use of its pivotal apps that deleted the ability to communicate for large portions of the world in recent months. If such a thing were to occur in an all-pervasive VR world like the Metaverse, the ramifications could be huge.

“The entire presentation of the Metaverse is so heavenly and ingenious,” says Bucher. I’m confident not everybody would be so excited about [having it in] the home space.”