Facebook adopted the name Meta in 2021 as its parent company while keeping Facebook as a social-network brand.
Facebook Inc. announced its corporate rebrand to Meta Platforms, Inc. on October 28, 2021. The change reflected the company’s intention to build products and services associated with the metaverse, a term used for interconnected virtual and augmented digital environments.
The corporate change did not rename the Facebook social network. Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger remained major products within Meta’s family of applications. Reality Labs became the division associated with virtual-reality hardware and related technology.
Meta is sometimes mistaken for the name of a new social network. It is the parent company’s name, while Facebook remains the name of the original platform. The company’s stock ticker also changed from FB to META in 2022.