Facebook's new name Meta draws range of reactions

SAN FRANCISCO • The company that runs the world's largest and most controversial social network has a new name. The reactions ranged from "like" to "angry emoji face".

On Thursday, Facebook Inc co-founder and chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg led a 90-minute video presentation about the company's efforts to build out an immersive digital world known as the metaverse.

He capped it off by sharing that his company will henceforth be known as Meta. Its social media services - Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook itself - will keep their names, but starting in December the company will begin using the stock ticker MVRS.

Many observers took to the Internet to weigh in on the name - officially Meta Platforms Inc, in full.

Mr Zuckerberg said the new name, coming from the Greek word for "beyond", symbolised there was always more to build.

Twitter Inc CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted out a different definition, "referring to itself or to the conventions of its genre; self-referential".

Mr Robert Scoble, a virtual reality enthusiast renowned in Silicon Valley for being photographed wearing Google Glass in the shower, said on Twitter that it was the "wrong company to sell us the future".

Others active in virtual reality work were less dismissive.

Mr Matthew Ball, a strategist and co-leader of the Roundhill Ball Metaverse ETF, which lists on the New York Stock Exchange as $META, said Facebook's new name is suited for the seismic shift in computing the social network wants to lead. "This isn't a New Coke situation," Mr Ball said. "We're not talking about a new product, but a belief in a fundamentally new plane of human existence."

Still, others embraced a parallel with cigarette maker Philip Morris, which became Altria in 2003.

"Facebook is following in the footsteps of Big Tobacco after the industry was exposed for its toxic and deadly impact on society," Mr Mike Davis, president of the Internet Accountability Project, a Facebook critic, said in a statement.

"Philip Morris got caught preying on kids, so they became Altria. Facebook got caught preying on kids, so they became Meta."

US Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat of New York, tweeted: "Meta as in 'we are a cancer to democracy metastasizing into a global surveillance and propaganda machine for boosting authoritarian regimes and destroying civil society... for profit."

Phillip Morris changed its name in a move to divert public perception from tobacco, its main business, and towards its food products. Verizon Communications Inc renamed its AOL and Yahoo properties as Oath, only to re-rebrand them two years later to Verizon Media.

Perhaps most infamously, Tribune Publishing in 2016 became Tronc, a mashup of the words "Tribune" and "online," but that produced so much mockery and ridicule that the publisher changed its name back within two years.

Facebook has rebranded itself with a new name, Meta, that focuses on the metaverse. But what does the metaverse mean?

WHAT IS IT?

Metaverse is a broad term. It generally refers to shared virtual world environments which people can access via the Internet. The term can refer to digital spaces which are made more lifelike by the use of virtual reality or augmented reality.

Some people also use the word metaverse to describe gaming worlds, in which users have a character that can walk around and interact with other players.

WHY IS IT TAKING OFF?

Fans of the metaverse see it as the next stage in the development of the Internet. Musicians can have virtual concerts within such metaverse platforms. The world's biggest fashion companies have also experimented with making virtual clothing, which people's avatars can wear in metaverse environments.

REUTERS

Professor of marketing Luc Wathieu at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business said Facebook's new name might help it create some psychological distance from its problems with consumers, though he was sceptical of that strategy's effectiveness, or whether that was even the point. "I'm not sure that it will reduce any of their current problems," he said. "They are still built the same way."

In a note, Robert W Baird & Co Inc analyst Colin Sebastian viewed Mr Zuckerberg's presentation as lacklustre compared with another famous tech demo. "In 2007, Steve Jobs actually presented an iPhone," Mr Sebastian wrote. "We'll have to wait longer for the metaverse."

BLOOMBERG, REUTERS