In a massive rebranding of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook will be changing its name to Meta during the company’s Connect event on October 28, 2021. In looking towards the future, Zuckerberg hopes the new name will better reflect Facebook’s values and the company as a whole.

Rumors first began emerging several weeks prior to the Connect event that Facebook was considering a name change. These rumors began in light of massive controversy following misinformation, harmful effects, and dangerous content on its platform, especially since Frances Haughen, a former Facebook employee, testified earlier in the month against Facebook’s regrettable business practices. The speculation reached a crescendo a few hours prior to the event when reporters noticed that Facebook’s iconic thumbs-up sign outside its company headquarters in Silicon Valley, California was covered up with a blank canvas.

Zuckerberg explained that Facebook was no longer just a social media platform. He hopes that, in the future, his creation can become a metaverse company, meaning a virtual reality space that blends the distinction between what’s real and what’s online. In the metaverse, one could theoretically go to work in a completely virtual setting before travelling down a virtual street into a virtual restaurant to have dinner with one’s manager. Although interesting, the idea is still in its infancy. The new name Meta holds a double meaning: it is both a direct nod to the metaverse that Zuckerberg hopes to create and also the symbol for a new chapter for Facebook as meta comes from the Greek word for “beyond” or “after”.

On a darker note, Facebook may also be changing its name to avert attention away from an abundance of negative press. After leaked documents earlier in the month, dubbed the “Facebook Papers”, exposed the company’s lack of action on controlling misinformation on its platform, as well as Facebook’s failure to regulate harmful content during the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 election. This is, however, still very much speculation, and it is uncertain how the name change to Meta will affect Facebook’s global reputation.

Interestingly, this is not the first time that a major company has rebranded itself. In 2015, Google reinvented itself as it moved all of its acquisitions, including the search engine itself and YouTube, under the parent company Alphabet Inc. Six years later, Facebook is doing the same: Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Oculus, and all of Facebook’s other holdings are now under the single umbrella company Meta. This bold decision may come as a shock, but Zuckerberg’s plans are undeniably ambitious. For now, we can now only wait and see how successful Facebook’s efforts will be, and whether we will all live and work in a metaverse in the future.