Facebook continues to generate headlines, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally being named a defendant in a consumer protection lawsuit and the company said to be planning a name change.
The still top-secret new corporate moniker, reported by The Verge, would serve as an umbrella for all Facebook brands much like Google became Alphabet in 2015 to reflect businesses beyond its search engine and Snapchat rebranded to Snap the year after. The shift comes as Zuckerberg pivots the company into its next phase that he’s dubbed the Metaverse..
Zuckerberg introduced the Metaverse on a conference call last summer, a reimagining of the business over time entailing massive annual investments with a focus on AR and VR. “It’s the future we are working towards. A virtual environment where you can be present with people in a digital space. An embodied Internet that you are inside of,” he said then.
He could announce the name change at Facebook’s Connect Conference on Oct. 28 or before, the Verge said. FB is set to report third-quarter earnings Oct. 25. On the call in late July, he described the Metaverse “the next generation of the Internet and the next chapter of us as a company” and said people will eventually transition “from seeing us as a social media company, to seeing us as a Metaverse company.”
The Verge speculated that a possible name could focus around Horizon, a still-unreleased VR version of Facebook. Facebook’s VR division Oculus has been a pioneer in headsets, funding virtual content creation and pushing the field forward. Facebook has set up a dedicated Metaverse team most recently announced plans a few days ago to hire 10,000 employees in Europe to work on the project. Head of AR and VR, Andrew Bosworth, was named FB’s chief technology officer.
On the legal front, the attorney general for the District of Columbia added Zuckerberg as a defendant in a consumer protection lawsuit after, “Our continuing investigation revealed that he was personally involved in decisions related to Cambridge Analytica and Facebook’s failure to protect user data.”
My office filed our lawsuit in 2018, and since then, we’ve reviewed hundreds of thousands of pages of documents produced in litigation and completed a wide range of depositions including former employees and whistleblowers.
— AG Karl A. Racine (@AGKarlRacine) October 20, 2021
The announcement by AG Karl Racine could expose the executive personally to financial and other penalties in the suit, filed in 2018 in Superior Court of the District of Columbia. It alleges Facebook misled consumers about privacy on the platform when it let political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica obtain sensitive data from more than 87 million users, including half of all District residents. An outcry then jumpstarted debate over online privacy.
In 2019, a judge rejected a Facebook motion to dismiss the suit. Racine said today that interviews and reviews of internal documents showed Zuckerberg was more active in key decisions than prosecutors had known. Facebook calls the allegations meritless.
Meanwhile, Facebook’s battering in the media and from lawmakers continues, fallout from a series of articles in the WSJ based on internal data provided by a whistleblower, who also testified at a Senate hearing, that renewed fears of the company’s hegemony. FB’s own data showed some harmful impacts on users and an apparent lack of response to its own findings — reignited debate over its impact on kids and society and algorithms that encourage divisive discourse to drive engagement and ad revenue.
Facebook has nearly 3 billion monthly active users.
On Capitol Hill, there’s a renewed sense of urgency around regulating social media but still no consensus on how.
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