After a presentation of five quarters of an hour, the high word came out on Thursday evening: Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg’s social media company, will now call itself ‘Meta’.
This holding now includes all business units such as Instagram, Messenger, Whatsapp, Facebook and the virtual reality glasses from Oculus. Including a new logo: the company replaces the iconic blue F on the facade of the headquarters with a blue lemniscate (the horizontal 8, the symbol for infinity). On December 1, the Facebook stock will trade on Wall Street under the name MVRS.
With the move, the Silicon Valley company wants to emphasize that it will focus on the ‘metaverse’, Zuckerberg’s dreamed version of the internet in the coming years. The presentation Thursday was a look inside the mind of Zuckerberg, who flew from one virtual world to another as an avatar during the event, meeting friends and colleagues. With undoubtedly Hollywood-esque budgets: 99 percent of the video consisted of spectacular computer animations.
Yes, it may have felt “like science fiction,” Zuckerberg said, surfing the waves as an avatar and playing poker in space with friends in weightless condition. Yet, according to Zuckerberg, this future is inescapable: a world in which we do not access the internet from a smartphone or laptop, but work, live and play together in digital environments via virtual reality and augmented reality glasses.
The new name comes at a time when the company is under fire over a series of sensitive leaked documents
With the name change, the 37-year-old American hopes to convince investors and employees that Facebook is still an inspiring technology company. Facebook – or Meta – has been plagued with scandals and investigations for privacy violations and monopolistic behavior, especially in recent weeks.
The flight forward
The name change comes at a time when the company has come under fire over a series of sensitive leaked documents from ex-employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen.
This week it emerged that employees had unsuccessfully warned Zuckerberg against the spread of conspiracy theories and fake news via Facebook in the run-up to the presidential election. It also turned out how Zuckerberg personally admitted to pressure from the Vietnamese government to have dissident posts censored on the platform.
By turning to the metaverse now, Zuckerberg is taking the flight forward and trying to refocus his attention on what good things his company can do in the future. In the hope that all the negative effects caused by the company he conceived in his Harvard dorm room in 2004 will fade into the background.
It’s a well-known strategy in business: Philip Morris changed its name to Altria in 2003 to protect its other brands (food company Kraft and beverage brand Miller) from the tobacco industry’s bad image. It didn’t work out for Altria: Kraft and Miller suffered from negative publicity about the health risks of Philip Morris’s cigarettes, and years later Altria split up again.
Zuckerberg is trying to avoid splitting up. Facebook can fall back on the approach of competitor Google. That company changed its name to Alphabet in 2015 to show that the company was more than a search bar. Despite the fact that the Alphabet name does not stick well and Google remains common as a brand name, this strategy has worked out well from a business perspective.
Google’s move was the reason for founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to fade into the background in 2015. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also handed over day-to-day management to his right-hand man Andy Jassy earlier this year, as Bezos no longer enjoyed running a company that is under constant pressure from negative publicity and hearings in the US Congress. Bezos now focuses on developing new products for Amazon and his hobby: rockets and space.
For Zuckerberg, stepping aside is absolutely not an option, he told this week in an interview with technology website The Information. Zuckerberg said he differentiated himself from his co-founders through his close involvement in the day-to-day running of his company. “It’s not like I sit back, come up with a vision and then hope it happens,” Zuckerberg said.
Zuckerberg is known as a micromanager, who cares about the smallest details and has a casting vote in all decisions with 58 percent of the voting shares. So nothing happens at Meta without Zuckerberg’s permission.
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North Star
Facebook (market capitalization: $870 billion) became big in custom advertising. A 3D version of the internet could open up new sources of income, such as games and sales of digital goods.
With its “North Star”, as Zuckerberg calls the metaverse, the company has to win over the young people again
Meta’s most concrete goal is the development of a game platform in virtual reality. This is the largest entertainment industry in terms of turnover, with an attractive young target group. Facebook is struggling with a waning influx of young people, including Instagram. That network feels the competition from Snapchat and TikTok.
With its “North Star”, as Zuckerberg calls the metaverse, the company has to win over the young people again. Although it will take “five to ten years” and “dozens of breakthroughs” according to Zuckerberg, if the metaverse is to become a real reality for the general public. The hardware falls short and is far too expensive for the masses.
Angelika Gifford, Facebook’s European director tells in a conversation with NRC that the plans for a new name and the metaverse have been going on within Facebook for a year and a half. “This is not a response to recent discussions about our company.”
According to Gifford, ‘Meta’ will not be cut up between the existing social media apps on the one hand and the metaverse on the other. “We want to be able to offer our users one experience. WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook are also getting a version for the metaverse.”
What will that look like in practice? Zuckerberg hopes that users will connect a photo-realistic avatar – a digital doll – to their real identity, like WhatsApp is now linked to a phone number. This makes Zuckerberg’s long-standing dream come true: at the start of Facebook, he already hoped that the Facebook account could one day be used as a ‘digital passport’.
The big question is what this means for privacy. Facebook now uses personal data from users to show tailor-made advertisements. More and more, the company sees access to personal data cut off by the operating systems of Apple and Google.
The metaverse would give Facebook the opportunity to collect personal data in its own environment. For example: Facebook’s latest VR glasses ‘read’ your facial expression and state of mind. In addition, Facebook’s Reality Lab is building cameras in glasses to scan the environment of users.
Metaverse must become a world where anyone can be filmed at any time and still feel safe, says Zuckerberg. During his presentation, he said he had “learned” from the unforeseen effects of social media. In this way, the Facebook founder hopes to prevent his fairytale internet from being dismissed as a new privacy nightmare.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC Handelsblad of 30 October 2021
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of October 30, 2021
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