Facebook Planning To Rebrand Itself With Name Change

Facebook plans to change its name next week to reflect its role as a parent company with multiple online features. Once limited to the social media platform Facebook, the company has expanded in recent years to include Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus, among others, as part of the Facebook family.

The new name aims to reflect this new reality and it will be revealed soon, likely at the company’s Connect conference on Oct. 28, “someone with direct knowledge of the matter” revealed to The Verge. Only a few higher-ups at Facebook are privy to what the name will be.

Facebook is not just online; it also designs consumer hardware products like AR glasses and Ray-Ban stories, which were released on Sept. 9, according to Engadget. CEO Mark Zuckerberg hopes these glasses will someday become as universally popular as smartphones.

In 2015, Google did the same thing, reorganizing itself under Alphabet, a company holding name, in part to signal that it was no longer just a search engine. Snapchat followed suit, changing its company holding name to Snap Inc. before it released a line of spectacles that could record 10-second video clips with a single tap of the finger.

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

Facebook announced plans Monday to hire 10,000 EU citizens to build the metaverse, or virtual reality platform, a term coined by sci-fi novelist Neal Stephenson.

News of the rebrand also comes after Frances Haugen, a former employee turned whistleblower, leaked damaging internal information to The Wall Street Journal that reveal Facebook’s complicity in online hate. She also testified about this matter before Congress.

In response, Facebook announced new rules on Oct. 13 to protect journalists, activists, and celebrities to battle the online hate crisis on its platforms. The name change could be a desire to distance the company from the sins of Facebook's social media platform, which has endured multiple controversies regarding information sharing, security, and online hate.

When Yahoo! Finance reached out to Facebook for a statement on the name change, company spokesperson Joe Osborne said, “we don’t comment on rumor or speculation.”