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Daily Record
Daily Record
World
Mya Bollan

Facebook name change announced as Mark Zuckerberg explains major rebrand

Facebook is going through a major rebrand with a new name – Meta – having been announced.

The company announced the change at its annual developer conference in a bid to "encompass" what the social media platform currently does.

Meta - AKA Facebook - has also revealed plans to create a new online world, metaverse.

A metaverse is to be created in order to bring together games, workers and social media users.

The plans will create a world where everyone can communicate in one place, whether it be for business or leisure, in a virtual environment.

The virtual environment will often use the method of VR headsets to communicate.

Mark Zuckerberg announced the changes at the company's yearly Connect event.

Explaining the major rebrand, the Facebook founder said that the social media platform's new name will be Meta "to reflect who we are and what we hope to build".

He said: "We are a company that builds technology to connect.

"Together, we can finally put people at the center of our technology. And together, we can unlock a massively bigger creator economy."

In terms of the "metaverse plans" Zuckerberg added "Right now, our brand is so tightly linked to one product," he said.

"But over time, I hope we are seen as a metaverse company."

Zuckerberg explained the changes as the "next chapter" for the social media giant, as well as being the next chapter for the internet as a whole.

Mark Zuckerberg now owns the Twitter handle @meta and meta.com, which now redirects to a welcome page on Facebook outlining the changes.

In a press release, the company also detailed the reasons for the shift.

It said that they hoped to "bring the metaverse to life and help people connect, find communities and grow businesses'.

"The metaverse will feel like a hybrid of today's online social experiences, sometimes expanded into three dimensions or projected into the physical world," the release added.

The name change follows a series of negative stories about Facebook, based on documents that were leaked to the world by an ex-employee.

Ex-employee Frances Haugen accused the social media giant of putting "profits over safety".

Facebook is not the first well known online platform to attempt a revamp. In 2015, Google restructured its company calling its parent firm Alphabet, however, the name has not caught on.

Drastic changes often follow scandal, decline in quality or other reasons related to a decline in popularity.

Often, a revamp is ordered in an attempt to shed the old, negative connotations and instead invite a new customer/user base.

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