facebook

The announcement by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg that the social media giant will change the name of its holding company to Meta in a virtual-reality rebrand has prompted dismay and bemusement.

On Thursday, Zuckerberg said Meta would encompass Facebook as well as apps such as Instagram, WhatsApp and the virtual reality brand Oculus.

“Announcing Meta — the Facebook company’s new name,” the tech giant said in a tweet. “Meta is helping to build the metaverse, a place where we’ll play and connect in 3D. Welcome to the next chapter of social connection.”

Meta refers to the ‘metaverse,’ which is the company’s new venture into shared augmented reality and virtual world environments for working and playing that people can access via the internet.

Facebook allegedly misled investors and masked slowing growth among critical demographics like young users in the US, according to internal documents leaked by whistleblower Frances Haugen.

The documents show that young people are generally spending less time on Facebook, fewer teens are signing up and many new teen accounts are duplicates as opposed to unique new users, Bloomberg reported Monday.

People across age groups are also creating fewer posts, and it’s unclear to Facebook employees why all this is happening, Bloomberg said, citing Facebook’s internal research.

Facebook’s bias is showing — again.

The tech giant’s employees have consistently pushed to suppress or de-platform right-wing outlets such as Breitbart, despite objections from managers trying to avoid political blowback, a scathing report by the Wall Street Journal revealed.

The internal debates — captured in message-board conversations reviewed by the publication — fuel new concerns that the platform is treating news outlets differently based on political slant.

Facebook has been mocked after a report said it is planning to rebrand its parent company with a new name next week in a bid to distance itself from a series of embarrassing scandals.

Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg plans to reveal the parent company’s new name at its annual Connect conference on October 28, but it could be unveiled sooner, the Verge reported.

The firm’s original, flagship social media site and app – Facebook – is expected to keep its moniker, but Facebook Inc., the parent company which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, will be given a rebrand.

OTTAWA – A broad swath of Canadians has a sour view of Facebook, with half of respondents to a new poll saying it should be regulated or broken up as a “corporate image” crisis rocks the social media giant yet again.

Forty per cent of those who responded to an online survey by Leger and the Association for Canadian Studies said they had a negative opinion of the company.

The vast majority also agreed that Facebook amplifies hate speech, helps spread fake news, damages individuals’ mental health and poses a risk to children and teenagers.

In a recent article, the New York Times outlines why the recently leaked internal Facebook documents indicate that the company is in more trouble than previously believed. The Times forecasts a storm brewing in Facebook’s future, and that was before the Masters of the Universe suffered a catastrophic outage of services that lasted about seven hours on Monday.

Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp are all down, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg has another headache: The personal data of 1.5 billion customers, scraped from his platform, is reportedly being offered for sale on the dark web.

User IDs, real names, email addresses, phone numbers, and locations are among the data of more than 1.5 billion Facebook customers that’s up for sale, according to a report on the cybersecurity news outlet Privacy Affairs on Monday. The going price has been quoted as $5,000 for a million names.