Facebook on Thursday announced it changed its name to Meta, part of a strategic shift to emphasize the development of its virtual world while its main social network business is in crisis.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made the announcement at Connect, the company’s annual hardware event where it talks about products like the Portal video devices and Oculus headsets.         

The rebranding — pegged to a virtual world and hardware known as the “metaverse” — comes amid a broader effort to shift attention away from revelations that the company knew its platform was causing a litany of social harms. The Facebook social network is not changing its name.

“From now on, we’re going to be the metaverse first. Not Facebook first,” Zuckerberg said in his keynote. “Facebook is one of the most used products in the world. But increasingly, it doesn’t encompass everything that we do. Right now, our brand is so tightly linked to one product that it can’t possibly represent everything we are doing.”

READ MORE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/28/facebook-meta-name-change/