Culture

Facebook Reportedly To Rebrand – Internet Reacts With Memes And Name Change Ideas

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Mark Zuckerberg to rebrand Facebook and change the name but Twitter reactions mock social media network.

Getty Image / Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images


Facebook is planning to rebrand itself with a new name next week, according to The Verge. The social media giant will allegedly change the name, which triggered a tidal wave of internet reactions and memes.

Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg will reportedly announce the social media network’s rebrand at the company’s annual Connect conference on October 28th – or possibly sooner. The rebrand would likely position the Facebook social media platform, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus under one umbrella brand such as what Alphabet Inc. did with Google and YouTube in 2015.

From The Verge:

A rebrand could also serve to further separate the futuristic work Zuckerberg is focused on from the intense scrutiny Facebook is currently under for the way its social platform operates today. A former employee turned whistleblower, Frances Haugen, recently leaked a trove of damning internal documents to The Wall Street Journal and testified about them before Congress. Antitrust regulators in the US and elsewhere are trying to break the company up, and public trust in how Facebook does business is falling.

The name change will purportedly focus on Facebook’s metaverse – which will allegedly create a new online realm that utilizes virtual and augmented technologies.

The metaverse is “going to be a big focus, and I think that this is just going to be a big part of the next chapter for the way that the internet evolves after the mobile internet,” Zuckerberg told The Verge’s Casey Newton this summer. “And I think it’s going to be the next big chapter for our company too, really doubling down in this area.”

The term “metaverse” was originally coined by sci-fi novelist Neal Stephenson to describe a virtual world people escape to from a dystopian, real world.

“A possible name could have something to do with Horizon, the name of the still-unreleased VR version of Facebook-meets-Roblox that the company has been developing for the past few years,” wrote Washington Post business reporter Hamza Shaban on Twitter.

The internet reacted to the news of Facebook’s name change with funny memes, jokes, and proposed ideas for name changes. There were name change ideas such as “Facepalm,” “Orwell,” “Metamark,” “Boomerbook,” “Spybook,” “Birthdaybook,” “imsellingyourdataverse,” and “Toon Town.”

https://twitter.com/blainecapatch/status/1450834763405828101

https://twitter.com/GRSJacksonReal/status/1450672079410499588

https://twitter.com/SkippyMcGizzard/status/1450689162164592643

https://twitter.com/lizzykate77/status/1450661291132063747

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