{"id":355762,"date":"2021-10-20T21:25:13","date_gmt":"2021-10-20T18:25:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/new-name-for-facebook-critics-cry-smoke-and-mirrors\/"},"modified":"2021-10-20T21:25:13","modified_gmt":"2021-10-20T18:25:13","slug":"new-name-for-facebook-critics-cry-smoke-and-mirrors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/new-name-for-facebook-critics-cry-smoke-and-mirrors\/","title":{"rendered":"#New name for Facebook? Critics cry smoke and mirrors"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#New name for Facebook<\/a>? Critics cry smoke and mirrors<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

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\"Critics
\n Critics have attacked a report that Facebook plans to rebrand itself.
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Facebook critics pounced Wednesday on a report the leading social network plans to rename itself, arguing it may be seeking to distract from recent scandals and controversy.<\/p>\n

The report from website The Verge, which Facebook refused to confirm, said the embattled company was aiming to show its ambition to be more than a social media site.<\/p>\n

But an activist group calling itself The Real Facebook Oversight Board, warned major industries like oil and tobacco had rebranded to “deflect attention” from their problems.<\/p>\n

“Facebook thinks that a rebrand can help them change the subject,” said the group’s statement, adding the “real issue” was the need for oversight and regulation.<\/p>\n

Facebook spokesman Andy Stone told AFP: “We don’t have any comment and aren’t confirming The Verge’s report.”<\/p>\n

The Verge cited an unnamed source noting the name would reflect Facebook’s efforts to build the “metaverse”, a virtual reality version of the internet that the tech giant sees as the future.<\/p>\n

Facebook on Monday announced plans to hire 10,000 people in the European Union to build the “metaverse”, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg emerging as a leading promoter of the concept.<\/p>\n

The announcement comes as Facebook grapp<\/a>les with the fallout of a damaging scandal, major outages of its services, and rising calls for regulation to curb its vast influence. <\/p>\n

The company has faced a storm of criticism over the past month after former employee Frances Haugen leaked internal studies showing Facebook knew its sites could be harmful to young people’s mental health.<\/p>\n

The Washington Post last month suggested that Facebook’s interest in the metaverse is “part of a broader push to rehabilitate the company’s reputation with policymakers and reposition Facebook to shape the regulation of next-wave Internet technologies.”<\/p>\n

Silicon Valley analyst Benedict Evans argued a rebranding would ignore fundamental problems with the platform.<\/p>\n

“If you give a broken product a new name, people will quite quickly work out that this new brand has the same problems,” he tweeted. <\/p>\n

“A better ‘rebrand’ approach is general<\/a>ly to fix the problem first and then create a new brand reflecting the new experience,” he added.<\/p>\n

Google rebranded itself as Alphabet in a corporate reconfiguration in 2015, but the online search and ad powerhouse remains its defining unit despite other operations such as Waymo self-driving cars and Verily life science<\/a>s.\n <\/p>\n\n

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Facebook eyes 10,000 EU jobs to build ‘metaverse’\n <\/p><\/div>\n

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\n \u00a9 2021 AFP<\/p>\n

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Citation<\/strong>:
\n New name for Facebook? Critics cry smoke and mirrors (2021, October 20)
\n retrieved 20 October 2021
\n from https:\/\/techxplore.com\/news<\/a>\/2021-10-facebook-critics-mirrors.html<\/p>\n

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