In the middle of a crisis, Facebook Inc. renames itself Meta

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said his company is rebranding itself as Meta, an effort to encompass its virtual-reality vision for the future.

Experts point out that it also appears to be an attempt to change the subject from the Facebook Papers, a document trove that has revealed how Facebook ignored or downplayed internal warnings of the negative and often harmful consequences its algorithms wreaked across the world.

Zuckerberg insists that the metaverse, what you might think of as the internet rendered in three dimensions, represents the next technological horizon for humanity.

And he thinks a billion people could be connected to it within a decade.