By: Ellina Koo

Did you know that one of the most famous social media apps, Facebook, had recently legally changed its name to something else? If you don’t know already, Facebook is a social networking site in which people can easily connect and share a variety of different things with families and friends online. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of the original Facebook, mainly had gotten the idea to create this app to bring the social experience of college to the internet so that those in college could connect one another. Although this was the case, Facebook had started to attract billions of users over the past few years, which then got Zuckerberg to improve the app in a way that people can use it to express their thoughts and opinions freely with whoever they want. Whether it’d be about the news or for an online business, Facebook has successfully gained much popularity over the past generations since it’s been created. 
On October 28th 2021, Facebook had announced that they would change their name permanently to Meta. I know many of you may be unfamiliar with this recent change as it’s happened suddenly, but there are a few key reasons as to why the Facebook Company was up for a new change. Meta’s focus is to bring the metraverse to life, help people connect, find communities, and grow businesses. It’s supposed to be the new evolution of social technologies by moving beyond 2D screens towards virtual reality. The company recently developed a new AI system to help tackle harmful content online, as the number of toxic posts continue to evolve expeditiously everyday. This new AI system uses a method called “few-shot learning,” in which has a general understanding of many different topics and can be used in more than 100 languages and learns from different kinds of data, such as images and text. As previously mentioned, the technology will help address harmful content that occur on the app, compared to Facebook. Also, the name change from Facebook to Meta may make sense from a commercial marketing perspective, but it’s also an obvious attempt to distance Mark Zuckerberg’s company from growing outrage over the harm it is causing to democracy in the U.S. and around the world. After all, it was for the better of Facebook’s CEO to make this change. Zuckerberg states that the name “meta” was inspired by his love of the classics, and that it comes from the Greek word “beyond. For me, it symbolizes that there is always more to build, and there is always a next chapter to the story.” It looks like Zuckerberg looks to see the success in the new Meta. There are at least three driving forces motivating Facebook to pursue the metaverse as one of the largest tech giants by focusing on public-relations strategy, founder ego, and a growing, industry-wide business imperative. Hopefully Meta becomes the most used social media platform that can captivate more of the population to enjoy the latest futuristic technology that’s part of it. Hello Meta and bye Facebook!