Facebook on Thursday announced that it has changed its company name to Meta.
The name change, which was announced at the Facebook Connect augmented and virtual reality conference, reflects the company’s growing ambitions beyond social media.
The re-branding also comes after the company has dealt with a barrage of news reports over the past month stemming from whistleblower Frances Haugen’s trove of internal documents.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about our identity as we begin this next chapter. Facebook is one of the most used products in the history of the world,” Zuckerberg said on Thursday. “It is an iconic social media brand, but increasingly it just doesn’t encompass everything that we do.
“Today we’re seen as a social media company,” he added, “but in our DNA, we are a company that builds technology to connect people. And the metaverse is the next frontier just like social networking was when we got started.”
Zuckerberg, who said he loved studying classics in school, said the name was inspired by the Greek word meta, which means “beyond.” “For me, it symbolizes that there is always more to build.”
Zuckerberg owns the Twitter handle @meta (whose tweets are protected as of this writing) and meta.com, which now redirects to a welcome page on Facebook outlining the changes. The site previously redirected to meta.org, a biomedical research discovery tool that was a project of the Chan Zuckerberg Science Initiative.
The company also replaced its corporate sign, which featured a picture of a “thumbs up,” outside of its California, headquarters with one touting its new logo: a blue infinity sign.
You can read more about the Facebook name change here.