Why Is Facebook Changing its Name in 2021?

 Facebook's new corporate name is Meta, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Thursday, in an apparent effort to recast the company's public image from battered social network to tech innovator focused on building the next generation of online interaction, 

Why Facebook is changing its name

Facebook has been notorious for its troubled public image for the past few years, thanks to everything from a few scandals over privacy issues to its rather bad data practices—even the "fake news" of the 2016 presidential election caused serious social problems in the company, and often had serious consequences for the trust people have in social media.

As an example, while all people knew of Facebook and Instagram when the company announced the news on Thursday, its users were reminded that just under three years ago, the company spent $19 million in the United States and $36 million in Canada on an anti-clickbait ad campaign for Facebook and Instagram.

What will the change to Meta look like?

Facebook is going to scrap the Facebook Messenger app, shifting away from the app's original goal of connecting people through messages, and toward the messaging interface that it uses today. "You can think about it as your personal ecosystem," Zuckerberg said.

It's also stripping the parent company of Facebook's current name, Netscape, which was also its previous corporate name. Facebook's app operates with a Facebook login, and it will still be the social network's most popular and most profitable app—the app had more than 1.3 billion users at the end of 2017, and generated more than $33 billion in revenue last year.

Why was Facebook's stock so bad this week?

Nasdaq's most valuable company is having trouble. Over the last week, Facebook's shares lost 12% of their value, which is worth more than $50 billion. Many investors appear to be souring on Facebook's user data scandal and have bet on negative sentiment to drive the stock further down. That's bad news for shareholders, but also leaves the social network even more exposed to regulatory problems, making it more expensive for Facebook to build new features. The company could also be hurting from questions about Zuckerberg's political ads, in the wake of U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russia's influence on the 2016 presidential election. 

The future of the company and why it matters to you

Meta is one of the top 10 emerging brands, according to retail consulting firm Fjuri, and it doesn't seem to have much to do with anything that already exists. When Zuckerberg said that Meta will be the name of the company's virtual reality company, the crowd cheered, but there were no clear similarities. The Meta identity goes back to 2011 when Facebook purchased Oculus VR, developer of a virtual reality headset.

As with many of the company's "future-forward" announcements, this one too came with very little explanation. But Zuckerberg said that "at the heart of Facebook" is "making the world more open and connected." Meta will be part of that mission.

Conclusion

Facebook is in a precarious position. I've always held it in high regard, but how many media outlets have opined that it is a bad company. The best thing that could happen to Facebook is a sharp decline in the range of 25-50%, and it wouldn't be unusual to see such a decline in the stock.

One of the key reasons why Facebook is plummeting in the news is the company's acquisitions of companies such as WhatsApp, Instagram, and Oculus. These deals, not only cost a lot of money, but they represent Facebook's buying at the top. It wants to build the world's most powerful social network, and now it owns it. If people find out that the goal of all this aggressive spending is to create a billion users of a new social network that isn't Facebook, they might be angered.