Facebook rebranded as Meta – but what do you think?

Chris Price News
Share


Yesterday evening Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a rebrand of the company’s corporate brand. From now on Facebook – the brand that owns Facebook the app, Instagram, WhatsApp and VR company Oculus – will be known as Meta.

In part, this has been done to reflect Zuckerberg’s goal to create a ‘metaverse’ of interconnected technologies although many think it’s a thinly disguised attempt to distance the company from recent negative publicity. Here are the thoughts of the Newspage community – it’s fair to say that most were fairly unimpressed!

Lee Chambers
Founder / Psychologist at Essentialise Workplace Wellbeing

“It’s the equivalent of an international career criminal changing his name by deed poll and prancing around telling people he’s all for the good of the human experience. Facebook is really good at psychologically hooking people onto their platform, but even they can’t fool people that this is anything other than a PR exercise designed to spray air freshener over the stench of the culture they have created. Meta will still smell like feta, and a shiny new logo isn’t going to clean up their messy back end.”
 

James Bore
Director at Bores Group Ltd

“This is a pretty cynical move to get away from what has been quietly known for years, and is becoming more and more public – that Facebook has prioritised profits over individual and societal health, actively worked to spread mis- and dis-information, assisting the weakening of democracy and part of a push towards a polarised society. And it’s done all of this with senior management being fully aware of the impact it has had. I expect plenty of effort to build a shiny new facade under the brand Meta, to try and manage the reputational impact on Facebook of their amoral and immoral decisions. But I do not expect anything substantial to change. The problem is that the scale of influence of Facebook and similar companies inevitably means that any attempt to rein them in is likely to end up little more than a slap on the wrist. For evidence, we can see the UK CMA’s fine of Facebook, for conscious failure to disclose information. It is the largest fine, by far, ever levied by the CMA at a little over £50m, and for Facebook has less of a financial impact than their last outage. I’m honestly not even sure whether to expect them to appeal the loss of less than a day’s profits.”

 

Jessica Ross
Founder at Jessica Ross Marketing

“Zuckerberg is one step closer to creating a Black Mirror-esque land for us all to live in. Fantastic. Too bad he couldn’t spend more time and attention on the tragic realities of his platform’s bullying, self-harm and body confidence issues first.”

Jez Lamb
Founder at [email protected]

Jif is still Jif, but maybe Mr Zuckerberg should use some to clean up the company’s image rather than trying to simply change the name.”

 

Malcolm Baker
Breeder at Halo Dart Frogs

“Why change the name to distance yourself from the dirt? Just clean up the dirt. When Marathons became Snickers, they were still Marathons, just under a different name. Nothing changed, they still tasted the same, and were still full of chocolate, sugar and peanuts.”
 

Ruth Bradford
Owner/founder/creator at The Little Black & White Book Project

“Pretty much the only way Mark Zuckerberg can distance himself from the Facebook dirt is to create his own alternate reality, sorry ‘metaverse’. This is not surprising news, but it’s all a bit Google Alphabet circa 2015. Get with the times, Zuck!”
 

Gillian Jones-Williams
Managing Director at Emerge Development Consultancy

“It’s no surprise that Facebook wants to distance itself from a lot of the perceived murky dealings that surround it. With the huge amount of excitement about the metaverse among wealthy investors and big tech firms, Zuckerberg won’t want to be left behind if it turns out to be the future of the internet and the way we communicate. And no doubt it will allow Facebook (sorry, Meta) to distance itself from any unsavoury situations with data breaches and security issues that might interfere with future investment.”
 

Lewis Shaw
Founder & Mortgage Expert at Shaw Financial Services

“Mark Zuckerberg wants to own the entire world. He’s a social media Bond villain in the making, just without the personality and the cat.”

Karen Watkins
Founder at Rowan Consulting

Smacks of a bad parent trying to disown its wayward children. Only in techland. Utterly ridiculous!
Chris Price
For latest tech stories go to TechDigest.tv

2 comments

  • Pingback: Facebook rebranded as Meta – but what do you think? – TechGeekSource
  • Pingback: Facebook rebranded as Meta – but what do you suppose? – Tech Digest – Pluskini

Comments are closed.