The “new branding name for Facebook” has been quite much in the news these days. Facebook's business name has been changed to Meta as of Thursday. Although the name of the parent business will change, the names of individual platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram will remain the same.

Mark Zuckerberg, the company's founder and CEO, explained that Meta refers to a technology called "metaverse" – which is a shared virtual environment that can be accessed by people who use a variety of different devices – in an interview.

A new logo for Facebook was also introduced by Zuckerberg at the company's headquarters in California, which replaces the thumbs-up "Like" with a blue infinity form.

According to Facebook's CEO, the current brand could not "possibly reflect all that we are doing now, never alone in the future," and that something needed to be done to remedy the situation.

"From now on, we're going to be focused on the metaverse first, rather than Facebook first," he explained.

What’s The Word In The Market?

Experts, on the other hand, believe that the move looks to be an attempt by the firm to reposition itself in the wake of a string of public relations disasters. Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee who turned whistleblower, released a series of records in which she accused the business of prioritising "profits before safety."

As a result of the disclosures, Facebook has come under fire in India for allegedly interfering with elections and failing to do more to combat hate speech and disinformation on the network. The social network firm has also been accused of allowing high-profile users to break the company's own standards for censoring material, which has been in place since 2011.

What’s The Word In The Press?

As reported by Reuters, Prashant Malaviya, an associate marketing professor at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business, believes that Facebook's decision to phase out the name Facebook demonstrates the company's desire to avoid scrutiny for the rest of its applications.

In his opinion, "without a doubt, [the Facebook name] has been damaged and is toxic," he stated.

In an interview with the Associated Press, marketing strategist Laura Ries said the decision is similar to that of oil corporation BP, which rebranded itself as "Beyond Petroleum" to avoid criticism that it was harming the environment.

According to her, "Facebook is the world's social media platform, and they are being accused of developing something that is destructive to people and society." "They can't just walk away from the social network with a new corporate identity and talk about a future metaverse," says the author.

Speaking Of Privacy On Meta

As per Nexthint’s report, Zuckerberg promised that the metaverse will contain privacy standards, parental controls, and disclosures about data usage, all of which were lacking on his social network, which was widely criticised at the time. During the company's most recent earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated that "ads will continue to be an important part of our strategy across the social media parts of what we do, and it will probably be a big part of the metaverse, too."