Facebook Goes Meta: Twitter, CEO Jack Dorsey, Others Take Jibes at Rebranding

Facebook on Thursday announced it was changing the parent company's name to “Meta.” Following the move, many people saw the rebranding exercise as an excuse to have a go at the social media giant. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was among them. He suggested that the new name of the company was confusing and it was not clear what it referred to. He called the title “self-referential.”

Zuckerberg has billed “Meta,” which comes from the word “metaverse,” as the future of both Facebook and the Internet. But Dorsey did not appear convinced about the exercise. “meta: referring to itself or to the conventions of its genre; self-referential,” he tweeted.

He was not alone. Twitter, too, joined him in having a good laugh.

The post has been retweeted over 23,000 times and has got 1.64 lakh ‘likes,' at the time of writing. One user (@AOC) had a dig on Facebook by referring to privacy concerns of its users and controversies surrounding it over allegedly giving importance to profit over removing problematic content.

Check some more hilarious reactions to Facebook's name changing exercise.

A week earlier, Dorsey had suggested he thought the idea of “metaverse” was dystopian. Referring to the term, a Twitter user said it was first coined by the science-fiction writer Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel "Snow Crash.” "It originally described a virtual world owned by corporations where end users were treated as citizens in a dystopian corporate dictatorship," the user said, asking, “What if Neal was right?"

Dorsey retweeted it, adding, "NARRATOR He was."

While Facebook's parent company will now be known as Meta, its social media apps — Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — which are used by billions of users worldwide, will continue to run under their present names.

Does WhatsApp's new privacy policy spell the end for your privacy? We discussed this on Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Orbital is available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts.