Hate or love it, Facebook is one of the greatest inventions of our time. Indeed, it’s the platform where you get to connect with your family, friends, schoolmates, and to some larger extent, your foes. Beyond connecting families and friends, Facebook has become a market platform where buyers and sellers interact frequently.
With roughly 2.80 billion monthly active Facebook users in the world, it’s the biggest social networking platform where the novice in business become the experts in the business. Because of that, the platform has been used to attract all kinds of people and organizations into subscribing to it.
Since its establishment in 2004, Facebook has grown beyond human imagination. Facebook shares have soared, both in the market value and its human population. From presidents to prime ministers, from business moguls to soccer players, active Facebookers have grown beyond just the college and high school users.
In a bid to expand beyond its market shares, in 2012, Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 billion. The acquisition of Instagram by Facebook didn’t end in 2012, it continued. In Feb 2014, Facebook acquired WhatsApp for $19.6 billion. Several reports indicate that the social networking giant paid an extra $3.6 billion of the initial price as compensation to WhatsApp employees for not leaving after WhatsApp was sold to Facebook.
Despite its technological and acquisition prowess, Facebook has faced a myriad of criticisms. From Cambridge Analytica data breach in 2016 to Congressional hearing in 2018, from removing iconic Vietnam war photo to suspending the video of the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016, from being fined $5 billion over violation of user privacy in 2019 to being criticized for not fact-checking political ads in the 2020 general elections in the United States. As a result, Facebook has generated a litany of controversies more than its competitors. Controversies that are hard to ignore.
On Thursday, October 28, Facebook changed its name to Meta. “It’s time for us to adopt a new company name to encompass everything we do,” said, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Facebook. According to Facebook’s website, the “metaverse is the next evolution of social connection.”
As Facebook grows, it’s looking for a massive rebrand, indicated by their name change to Meta. The question is, “Will a simple name change their perception amongst the public at large?”
Perhaps Facebook’s problem has actually been the public at large. The problems they have faced in the past have mostly been about the breach of data privacy and mismanaging the trends that they offer the platform to create. It’s moved beyond a simple tool for friends who live far apart to connect via posts about life events. The larger picture of Facebook influences political results, public perception of social issues like abortion, and even has a tendency to polarize the public based on the differing content they view over time.
Facebook has left the small world of last weekend’s brunch pictures behind and become a larger entity. Perhaps that’s why they chose the name Meta. It could indicate a renewed commitment to addressing the larger issues that arise on Facebook.
If they become more than merely a bulletin board that holds up any post and become a better steward of both the information and trends that arise amongst the chaos, then perhaps Meta can become Facebook never could be: more than a collection of humans’ thoughts. Meta faces the opportunity to shape the perceptions of the world in which we live by taking a more active role in the content it holds. It remains to be seen if they will take it.
