Tech Insights - Facebook Rebrands to Meta, in a Bid to Unify Account Structures

Announced at its Facebook Connect conference, Facebook is rebranding as Meta, to avoid confusion between the company and its main product. This is a continuation of its efforts in 2019 to differentiate the company from the product, as well as an attempt to reposition itself as more than a social media company. This has also come at a time when the company is investing more than $10 billion a year into research and product development of the metaverse, understood as an online platform where multiple forms of services can be accessed; typically through a virtual or augmented reality environment.

Critics have suggested that this is an attempt to downplay the recent criticism the company has faced in recent months; a charge Mark Zuckerberg has explicitly denied. However, this is likely to be the perception among many of Facebook’s critics, amid reports explicitly linking this rebranding to the reputational damage done by Frances Haugen’s document leaks and claims of ignoring known harm to children and fuelling misinformation and political violence.