Report: Facebook Plans to Change Its Name in Coming Weeks

Social media giant Facebook reportedly plans to change its company name next week to focus on the company’s development of the “metaverse” virtual world. The move could also be spurred by recognition by the Masters of the Universe that the Facebook name has been tarnished by a tidal wave of scandals.

The Verge reports that according to sources with direct knowledge of the situation, Facebook plans to completely rebrand the company next week. The social media giant reportedly plans to change its company name to focus on its development of the “metaverse” online world.

It’s expected that CEO Mark Zuckerberg will discuss the name change at the company’s annual Connect conference on October 28, but could announce the change sooner. The move is reportedly part of Facebook’s efforts to display its ambition outside of social media.

The Facebook app will still exist, but will act as a product under a parent company, like Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus are currently to Facebook. Facebook reportedly has more than 10,000 employees developing consumer hardware such as augmented reality glasses that Zuckerberg believes will soon become as important and commonly used as the modern smartphone.

Zuckerberg told the Verge in July that over the next few years “we will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company.”

A major Facebook rebrand could also help to separate the company’s focus on futuristic tech like the metaverse from the scrutiny that Facebook’s social media platforms face.

Facebook has dealt with a number of scandals in recent weeks based on the “Facebook Files” series from the Wall Street Journal which made a number of damning claims about the tech giant based on a series of internal company documents. Shortly afterward, former Facebook employee Frances Haugen came forward as the source of these documents and testified about the company before Congress. Amidst all of this, Facebook then suffered its longest outage in years with all services going offline for over six hours.

Other tech giants have similarly changed their company organization and naming schemes, in 2015 Google reorganized under a holding company named Alphabet. Based on current information, it seems that Facebook plans to do something similar.

Read more at the Verge here.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com