Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of Facebook, announced Thursday the creation of Meta, a parent company to better represent all of its platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, Messenger and Oculus.
The names of the different services will remain unchanged.
The founder of the tech giant, accused of putting profits before humans by many elected officials, chose "meta" - "beyond" in ancient Greek - to show that there is "always more to build" and a new blue logo in the shape of a horizontal "8", resembling the infinity symbol in mathematics.
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Mark Zuckerberg took advantage of this announcement to also present the “metaverse”, a meta-universe in French, which according to him represents the future of the Internet, after the era of computers and that of smartphones.
The public will have access to it to interact, work or play through augmented reality glasses and virtual reality headsets, in particular.
But this name change is interpreted as a distraction maneuver by detractors of the Californian group, entangled in scandals, from data confidentiality to respect for competition law.
The anger of authorities and civil society has grown in recent weeks against Facebook, thanks to the revelations of a whistleblower, Frances Haugen, which shows that the group has chosen to ignore some of the dangers - toxic content on Instagram for teens, disinformation that harms democracy, etc.
- for the sake of preserving its profits.
Meta wants to invest billions over the coming years to build an ecosystem that is supposed to represent, within ten years, "a billion users, hundreds of billions of dollars in digital commerce and millions of jobs for creators and developers ”.
