Facebook renames itself Meta

At its Connect conference, Facebook’s parent company announced it would rename itself Meta, with Mark Zuckerberg describing the metaverse — shared, three-dimensional online spaces — as “the next evolution in a long line of social technologies.” The individual apps, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, kept their existing names and continued to operate as before; only the parent company’s name, ticker symbol and financial reporting structure changed, splitting the business into a “Family of Apps” segment and a “Reality Labs” hardware and software division. Alongside the rebrand, the company announced a $150 million investment in immersive-learning tools for creators.

The announcement landed amid the company’s most intense scrutiny yet: whistleblower Frances Haugen had recently leaked internal research on the platforms’ effects on teenagers and their role in the 6 January Capitol riot, and commentators were quick to describe the rename as an attempt to separate the company’s future from Facebook’s accumulated reputational damage. Zuckerberg denied the timing was connected to those controversies.

The pivot committed enormous engineering and capital resources to virtual and augmented reality — Reality Labs went on to report tens of billions of dollars in cumulative operating losses over the following years — at the expense of what the company’s research division, Meta AI, might otherwise have pursued. That reallocation proved temporary: as large language models became the industry’s central preoccupation from 2022 onward, Meta redirected investment back toward AI research and its own foundation models, and the metaverse push receded from the company’s public messaging.