Embroiled in controversies, tech giant Facebook plans to change its name, to calibrate its business narrative, technology blog, The Verge, said.
Although the new name is yet to be disclosed, as information is kept under wraps, the tech firm’s move was reportedly necessitated by the need to shift its focus to the metaverse.
The new name that will be shared next week, according to The Verge who credited a source with knowledge of the matter, will reflect Facebook’s new direction.
While the social media app Facebook would retain its name, the parent company – under which products such as WhatsApp, Instagram, Oculus, and others fall under – will get a change of name.
This comes as a former employee of the tech firm gave a damning revelation on the operations of the company, testifying before the US Congress on the shared internal documents.
Prior to that, Facebook was slammed with a $5 billion fine by the Federal Trade Commission in 2019 for its work with a British company Cambridge Analytics, for mining the data of 87 million profiles of US citizens for political use.
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The mined data was said to have played a part in the campaign of former US President Donald Trump in 2016.
Earlier in July, Zuckerberg had stated the company’s desire to pivot from being known only as a social media company to being a “metaverse company”.
The word metaverse was originally coined by science fiction writer Neal Stephenson to describe a virtual escape for people from a dystopian world.
Facebook has made no comments on the matter, stating that it did not respond to “speculations”.
