On Thursday, Facebook parent Meta Platforms (FB) officially changed its ticker to "META" to reflect its new focus on the metaverse.
It's a decisive step in the company's effort to shed traces of its old name. While a number of tech companies have undergone name changes in recent years, Meta's re-brand was especially notable, not only for the size of the company, but for the contentious circumstances in which it announced it would go from Facebook to Meta Platforms.
In October 2021, Facebook announced it would become Meta weeks after whistleblower Frances Haugen's bombshell allegations hit the news. Haugen, a former product manager at the company, said that Facebook knew the extent to which its platforms were used to spread disinformation and hate, and chose to do nothing, prioritizing its profits.
Haugen's contentions are far from the only problems that Facebook, now Meta, has encountered in recent years. In 2018, a whistleblower revealed that Facebook allowed British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to improperly collect its users' data, ultimately weaponizing that information in political advertising. The company subsequently paid billions in fines to the Federal Trade Commission, and was forced to face down a firestorm of criticism about how it manages users' privacy. Meta even took out full-page newspaper ads apologizing for the data harvesting.
Experts previously told Yahoo Finance that the company's name change is tied on some level to hopes that a switch would offset the scandals associated with the Facebook name.
An uncertain time at Meta
This is already an unsettled time at Meta, as longtime COO Sheryl Sandberg said last week she'd be stepping down this fall. Sandberg, who pioneered the company's ads model, was a key figure in Facebook's rise — and, by extension, has attracted scrutiny in the social media giant's scandals, too. As the company faced heightened criticism a few years ago, tensions reportedly grew high between CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Sandberg. Especially amid the Cambridge Analytica fallout, Sandberg served as then-Facebook's public face, interfacing with both media and Congress — and Zuckerberg blamed her for the depth of the crisis, the Wall Street Journal reported in 2018.
Sandberg is slated to be replaced by Javier Oliván, who's currently Meta's Chief Growth Officer and has been with the company for more than 14 years, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Facebook stock dropped in response to the news of Sandberg's resignation on June 1, but has since rebounded. However, its stock remains far from the all-time high it hit in 2021.
Allie Garfinkle is a senior tech reporter at Yahoo Finance. Find her on twitter @agarfinks.
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