Facebook is about to rebrand itself as it sinks deeper into trouble – sources

Facebook rebrand
FILE PHOTO: A 3D-printed Facebook logo is seen placed on a keyboard in this illustration taken March 25, 2020. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration

(Reuters) -Facebook Inc, under fire from regulators and lawmakers over its business practices, is planning to rebrand itself with a new name that focuses on the metaverse, the Verge reported on Tuesday.

The name change will be announced next week, The Verge reported, citing a source with direct knowledge of the matter.

The move would likely position the flagship app as one of many products under a parent company overseeing brands such as Instagram and WhatsApp, according to the report. Google adopted such a structure when it reorganized into a holding company called Alphabet in 2015.

Facebook said it does not comment on “rumor or speculation.”

Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has been talking up the metaverse, a digital world where people can move between different devices and communicate in a virtual environment, since July and the company has invested heavily in virtual reality and augmented reality, developing hardware such as its Oculus VR headsets and working on AR glasses and wristband technologies.

The buzzy word, first coined in a dystopian novel three decades earlier, is popular in Silicon Valley and has been referenced by other tech firms such as Microsoft. The popular children’s game Roblox describes itself as a metaverse company. Epic Games’ Fortnite is also considered to be part of the metaverse.

Zuckerberg plans to talk about the name change at the company’s annual Connect conference on Oct. 28, but it could be unveiled sooner, the Verge said.

The move would come at a time when Facebook is under wide-ranging scrutiny from global lawmakers and regulators over its content moderation practices and harms linked to its platforms, with internal documents leaked by a whistleblower forming the basis for a US Senate hearing last week.

“It reflects the broadening out of the Facebook business. And then, secondly, I do think that Facebook’s brand is probably not the greatest given all of the events of the last three years or so,” internet analyst James Cordwell at Atlantic Equities said.

“Having a different parent brand will guard against having this negative association transferred into a new brand, or other brands that are in the portfolio,” said Shankha Basu, associate professor of marketing at University of Leeds.

(Reporting by Shivam Patel and Shubham Kalia in Bengaluru; Additional reporting by Bhargav Acharya and Juby Babu; Editing by Rashmi Aich and Anil D’Silva)

Editor’s comment: whether Facebook – a company that has been fined over $80 million in the last 24 hours and told that it cannot be trusted to manage cryptocurrency – can pull off a rebrand, reflecting something so new and futuristic that most people cannot imagine it, is doubtful. What is becoming obvious is that it has to do something, and something bold, if it is not to become too toxic a company to survive.

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