Jaeden Schafer

It was definitely a big shift from basically focusing themselves on social media.

They're kind of like a new company.

It was like a big new marketing thing.

But

Part of the strategy hinged on they kind of had this belief that Gen Z was going to prefer to socialize inside of online games like Fortnite and Roblox instead of on sort of feed based apps like Instagram.

So, of course, they did this big name change thing.

And also this the name change had another purpose, which basically was to distance them from they had a lot of years of reputational damage tied to Facebook.

So at that point, the brand was kind of they had the whole Cambridge Analytica data scandal.

And there's a bunch of like internal documents and whistleblower things that were basically just making Facebook's brand not as good.

And in how, you know, there's a bunch of whistleblowers and how it was harming teens and children.

And there's all of these like congressional hearings over surveillance and misinformation and then allegations of them being a monopoly and then allegations of censorship.

And then, you know, like there's just so much drama with the whole Facebook thing.

So rebrand, call it meta.

and they were just like, look, here's our new vision.

We're going to build the metaverse.

It's going to become the next great social platform.

It's going to be, you know, a virtual world.

Users are going to gather.

They had Horizon Worlds was kind of the main app or hub where they did that.

And they, you know, they said like everyone's going to play and work and socialize using Meta's VR headsets.