Twitter has mocked Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that Facebook is changing its name to Meta on its own social media platform.
“The only #META we acknowledge is this,” the Twitter Safety Account posted along with an article on Twitter’s Machine Learning, Ethics, Transparency and Accountability team.
The Facebook boss said on Thursday that the company’s name change was part of its commitment to its “metaverse” all-encompassing technology strategy.
The Facebook social media app will continue to use its original name, but other app such as WhatsApp and Instagram will distance themselves from it.
“Today, we’re seen as a social media company. But in our DNA, we’re a company that builds technology to connect people, and the metaverse is the next frontier, just like social networking was when we got started,” Mr Zuckerberg said at the Connect 2021 event.
“From now on, we’re going to be metaverse first, not Facebook first.
“That means that over time, you won’t need to use Facebook to use our other services as our new brand starts showing up in our products. I hope that people come to know the Meta brand and the future that we stand for.”
Mr Zuckerberg denied that the change was being made because of the bad news cycle surrounding Facebook and claimed it “had nothing to bear on this.”
“Even though I think some people might want to make that connection, I think that’s sort of a ridiculous thing. If anything, I think that this is not the environment that you would want to introduce a new brand in,” he said in an interview with The Verge.
The company will not change its corporate structure but its stock will start trading under the ticker symbol MVRS on 1 December.
Lawmaker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to Twitter to call Facebook a “cancer to democracy” and mocked its announcement that the company is changing its name to Meta.
“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!’” the New York congresswoman tweeted.
