By Sammie Jones-
Facebook has officially revealed the new name of the world’s biggest social media company.
Announcing the news at Facebook’s Connect conference, Zuckerberg said:
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”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
The announcement comes a week after it was first reported that Zuckerberg was planning a major rebranding for the company, which operates a number of the world’s most popular social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
The news of a new name broke just days after a whistleblower came forward to testify that the company was aware its algorithms were pushing harmful content on teenagers, while Zuckerberg continues to face pushback over perceived failures by Facebook to stop the spread of far-right conspiracies and misinformation related to the Covid-19 pandemic and 2020 election.
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The term metaverse was originally coined by science fiction writer Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel Snow Crash.
Faced book produced an interesting video on Thursday showing Zuckerberg riding a virtual reality electric hydrofoil (in a nod to his real-life hobby), fencing with a hologram and walking through a 3D-rendering of his “home space.”
Facebook is investing in virtual reality and other next-generation products and services, and the social media giant also announced plans to hire 10,000 workers in Europe over the next five years to build the metaverse.
On Thursday, Zuckerberg said he expects to invest “many billions of dollars for years to come,” painting a vision of the future where a billion people will use the metaverse and it will generate hundreds of billions of dollars in digital commerce — while acknowledging it remains “a long way off.”
“We are fully committed to this,” Zuckerberg said. “It is the next chapter of our work and, we believe, for the internet overall.”
Zuckerberg also confirmed that the company will center privacy and safety as it builds its new virtual services and hardware.
“Privacy standards will be built into the metaverse from day one,” he said. “One of the lessons I’ve internalized from the last five years is we need to emphasize these principles from the start.”
People under 30 are spending less time on Facebook, posting less and sending fewer messages, according to an internal report prepared in March and reported on by Bloomberg.
Meanwhile, Instagram, which the company views as a pipeline for younger users who will eventually age into its other apps, is losing teenagers to other social media platforms — a phenomenon the company identified as an “existential threat,” the New York Times reported.
Zuckerberg told investors on Monday he’s reorienting the company around appealing to young adults ages 18 to 29, rather than the older crowd that has become its core. He cited threats including short video app TikTok, which he said is “one of the most effective competitors that we have ever faced.”
The company’s big corporate overhaul comes as Congress threatens to pass tougher regulations on the tech industry, with some lawmakers saying it has grown so big and powerful that it is like Big Tobacco in its heyday.
“Facebook is going through so much turmoil, so much negativity” that the name change risks looking like “you are trying to hide something,” said Prashant Malaviya, a marketing professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business.
Similarly, the Facebook social network, known internally as the “big blue app,” isn’t going anywhere.
“The Facebook brand is going to continue to exist. The app will be there. Instagram is still going to be there,” Malaviya said. “And that’s where we have the problems with what the company is doing.”
In 2015, Google reorganiSed under a new parent company called Alphabet and its founders handed over the day-to-day running of its lucrative search engine — although the company is still widely referred to as “Google.”
If that history is any guide, Malaviya said, don’t expect the name “Facebook” to disappear from conversation or headlines.
“Even if they’re talking about this new company, the people on Wall Street and Main Street might still continue to say, well, yeah, that’s still just Facebook.”
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