Facebook is changing its name as Zuckerberg builds his “metaverse”

Facebook is, according to a report by The Verge, going to be changing its name and the rebranding exercise could happen as early as next week at the company’s Connect Conference scheduled for the 28th of October.

The shift by Facebook is meant to signal that the company is more than just a social media network. What this essentially means is that the Facebook app is just going to be one of the products that the yet to be unnamed parent company offers.

As I am sure you are all aware Facebook dominates in the social media sphere with its family of apps Instagram and WhatsApp. The former has about 1.36 billion users while the latter sits at around 1.6 billion. Of the top 10 social media and content platforms, Facebook’s family of apps has 3 in the top five. Additionally, Facebook also has 10,000 employees building consumer products, so at face value the name change/parent company makes sense.

The Facebook rebrand will also reportedly give Zuckerberg some distance (if that’s possible) from the controversies that have plagued the entity. This year kicked off with the WhatsApp privacy policy change that forced the messaging app’s PR team to work overtime addressing privacy concerns.

More recently, an internal report was leaked to The Wall Street Journal and revealed that the platform was detrimental to teen mental health. It didn’t stop there for Facebook as a former employee, Frances Haugen, testified in front of Congress on the matter of child safety and other issues that Facebook has internally. All of this was further compounded by the massive outage that Facebook and its family of apps suffered at the beginning of October.

As to the matter of the metaverse, it looks like Facebook wants to position itself on the bleeding edge of the internet’s evolution. What that is going to look like exactly is still up for debate but I am sure there is a Marvel Cinematic Universe/ Thanos joke in there somewhere.