Facebook Parent Meta to Trade Under Ticker ‘META’ on Nasdaq From June 9

Meta Platforms said on Tuesday its Class A common stock will begin trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol 'META' prior to market open on June 9, replacing its current ticker symbol 'FB'.

The company changed its name from Facebook to Meta Platform in October last year in a rebrand that focuses on building the "metaverse," a shared virtual environment that it bets will be the successor to the mobile Internet.

The current ticker 'FB' has been in use since the company's initial public offering in 2012.

The company has recently introduced several other changes. A few days back, Meta Platforms said that it will share more data on targeting choices made by advertisers running political and social-issue ads in its public ad database.

Meta said it would also include detailed targeting information for these individual ads in its "Facebook Open Research and Transparency" database used by academic researchers, in an expansion of a pilot launched last year.

"Instead of analysing how an ad was delivered by Facebook, it's really going and looking at an advertiser strategy for what they were trying to do," said Jeff King, Meta's vice president of business integrity, in a phone interview.

The social media giant has faced pressure in recent years to provide transparency around targeted advertising on its platforms, particularly around elections. In 2018, it launched a public ad library, though some researchers criticised it for glitches and a lack of detailed targeting data.

Meta said the ad library will soon show a summary of targeting information for social issue, electoral or political ads run by a page.

"For example, the Ad Library could show that over the last 30 days, a Page ran 2,000 ads about social issues, elections or politics, and that 40 percent of their spend on these ads was targeted to 'people who live in Pennsylvania' or 'people who are interested in politics,'" Meta said in a blog post.

© Thomson Reuters 2022