Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has a strong reaction to Facebook’s decision to rename the company.
She tweeted Thursday, “Meta as in ‘we are a cancer to democracy metastasizing into a global surveillance and propaganda machine for boosting authoritarian regimes and destroying civil society… for profit!'”
Ocasio-Cortez included a video of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s annoncement.
“To reflect who we are and what we hope to build, I am proud to announce that starting today our company is now Meta,” Zuckerberg said.
He added, “Our mission remains the same. It’s still about bringing people together. Our apps and their brands, they’re not changing either. And we are still the company that designs technology around people. But now we have a new north star to help bring the metaverse to life.”
Meta as in “we are a cancer to democracy metastasizing into a global surveillance and propaganda machine for boosting authoritarian regimes and destroying civil society… for profit!” https://t.co/jzOcCFaWkJ
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) October 28, 2021
During Connect, the company’s annual hardware event, Zuckerberg also said the company’s brand “is so tightly linked to one product that it can’t possibly represent everything we are doing.”
He explained how the company expects “to invest many billions of dollars for years to come before the metaverse reaches scale.”
Zuckerberg added, “We believe the meta verse will be the successor to the mobile internet.”
The name of the Facebook social platform will not change.
The change comes amid backlash following reports from several news organizations on leaked documents from inside the company.
Zuckerberg told analysts, “Good faith criticism helps us get better, but my view is what we are seeing here is a coordinated effort to selectively use the leaked documents to paint a false picture of our company.”
He continued, “The reality is that we have an open culture where we encourage discussion and research on our work so we can make progress on many complex issues that are not specific to just us.”