Facebook’s Metaverse and Papers
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Editor's note: Pranav here. Two things about Facebook in today’s Things Change. First, Facebook is now called Meta. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been hyping up the idea of a “metaverse” company since June this year, which is when he announced that the future of Facebook Inc. would lie in an evolution of the web combined with virtual reality. With the new reveal, much of the chatter has revolved around the company’s rebranding, which had been rumoured for a while; apart from various meta jokes, one common thread is that the new name and brand is intended to shift attention away from Facebook’s issues with hate speech, privacy and antitrust around the world. But the bigger shift to a metaverse or virtual reality business is something that Facebook and Zuckerberg have telegraphed for the better part of a decade now. It started in 2014, when Facebook bought two-year-old virtual reality startup Oculus VR for $2 billion, the company’s second-largest acquisition ever. (The largest was WhatsApp for $16 billion, also announced in 2014; the third-largest was Instagram for $1 billion in 2012.) Oculus, which …
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