Facebook might change its name next week and rebrand

Facebook has been under scrutiny recently ever since ex-employee turned whistleblower Frances Haugen called out the company for knowing and not doing anything about the negative impact Instagram had on teen users. Now, The Verge reports that Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg is planning to actually rebrand the platform and change its name, and this news could reportedly come next week.

Zuckerberg wants to rebrand Facebook and co to better reflect the 'metaverse'

The name change will reportedly be announced by Zuckerberg during the company's annual Connect conference on October 28th. The new name will reflect the tech giant's ambitions to be known for more than just a social media platform (and probably separate the company from social-media-related scrutiny). This rebrand will make Facebook just an app out of many products under a parent company.

The tech giant has already more than 10,000 employees that are busy working on consumer hardware like AR glasses, and Zuckerberg believes the tech will eventually be globally adopted in coming years to become as omnipresent as smartphones. Reportedly, he wants people to see the company not only as a social media company but as a 'metaverse' company.


However, Facebook changing its name is not a precedent in the tech world. Back in 2015, Google did a similar thing with reorganizing entirely under a company called Alphabet, and a part of this change was to reflect the fact that it no longer was only a search engine, but a conglomerate. Snapchat rebranded to Snap Inc. in 2016 and at the same time, started calling itself a "camera company", which also started selling Spectacles camera glasses.

The new name Facebook is going to go under is still unknown and reportedly, it's been kept a secret even from senior leadership members in the company. The name itself could have something to do with Horizon (this is the name of the still-unreleased VR Facebook has been developing in recent years). Recently, Facebook also had a demo for a workspace collaboration tool called Horizon Workrooms.

Facebook has recently been working on laying the groundwork for the next generation of technology, and the past summer, it created a dedicated metaverse team. Andrew Bosworth, the head of AR and VR, is to be promoted to chief technology officer. Additionally, a couple of days ago the company announced its plan to hire 10,000 more employees to work on the metaverse in Europe.

Zuckerberg has stated earlier that the metaverse will be the next chapter of the evolution of the internet after the mobile internet, and it's going to be a big chapter for the company as well.

But what is exactly the metaverse? Facebook has been promoting this idea recently, but the idea is not widely understood yet. This is a term first used by sci-fi novelist Neal Stephenson and was used to describe a virtual world where people could escape from the real world.

Recently, Facebook has been under intense scrutiny over the allegations of Frances Haugen

Frances Haugen was a Facebook employee which has recently shared internal documents that revealed some worrying things about the social media giant. These documents showed that the company was well aware of the negative impact Instagram had on young teens and their self-image but still decided to not do much to take care of their users' mental health, putting profit first.