AP Photo/Mark Lennihan
- Facebook hasn't got the @meta handle on Instagram because a motorbike magazine already owns it.
- Instead, Facebook has the @wearemeta handle.
- Facebook revealed a huge rebrand Thursday, including a new corporate name, Meta, and a focus on the "metaverse."
Facebook unveiled a huge rebrand on Thursday, including changing its corporate name to Meta – but it hasn't got the @meta handle on Instagram despite owning the platform.
Instead, @meta belongs to a Denver-based motorbike magazine, as Quartz reported.
Facebook has claimed the @wearemeta handle on Instagram, which had reached 1 million followers by Friday morning. The account has posted a stream of content from over the past 18 months, with its earliest viewable post from March 2020.
Facebook does, however, own the @meta handle on Twitter, as well as the domain meta.com.
Tech reporter Teddy Schleifer reported that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the foundation that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg runs with his wife Priscilla Chan, already owned the @meta Twitter handle and the trademark to the name. Meta.org was a scientific-research platform which the Initiative is now sunsetting, per an announcement on Thursday.
Under the rebrand, Facebook's main social-media app will still be called Facebook, but the parent company that owns it will be called Meta Platforms, or Meta for short. Other apps and products it owns, including Workplace, Instagram, and WhatsApp, will come under the new brand.
Facebook said its stock would start trading under the ticker symbol MVRS from December 1 - but that hasn't stopped shares for Meta Materials, a Canadian materials-technology company trading under MMAT, soaring after Facebook's new name was announced.
Zuckerberg unveiled the rebrand as he announced he was shifting the company's focus towards developing a metaverse, a virtual space where people interact digitally using avatars and virtual reality.
"From now on, we are going to be Metaverse first, not Facebook first," Zuckerberg said Thursday.
Experts told Insider's Katie Canales that the name change wouldn't be enough to save the company from a huge backlash prompted by a recent leak of whistleblower documents. The documents covered topics including its fading popularity with teens and its reported problems stopping hate speech.
On Monday, 17 US news organizations launched "The Facebook Papers", a series of articles based on the leaked documents and interviews with former Facebook staffers.