The last week’s rebranding of Facebook Inc to “Meta” has been mocked by Israelis and Hebrew speakers and social media users worldwide since the name in question, in Hebrew, is the conjugation of the feminine form for “dead”, leading to the hashtag ‘#FacebookDead, ‘ The Jerusalem Post reports.
Jokes erupted on the platform with one Twitter user saying “she wanted to open a Facebook account, but was told that it was dead now,” but the Israeli emergency rescue unit Zaka, whose job is to collect human remains to ensure proper burials, took the mocking to a higher level tweeting: ‘Don’t worry, we’re on it’.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who was raised as a Reform Jew, made no comment to the online ridicule.
Another user pointed that the social media company didn’t do the branding and translation research before rebranding on Thursday, when Zuckerberg explained the new name ‘seeks to start building the metaverse’, a shared virtual environment that aim to become the next big computing platform.
However, jokes and ridicule on Twtter seem to be the least of the problems the social media conglomerate has found itself in lately considering the recent reports confirming that that Facebook has failed in policing abusive content, hate speech, inflammatory rhetoric and misinformation on its platform.
The company has also faced intense scrutiny in the wake of the whistleblower Frances Haugen’s testimony stressing that Facebook prioritizes profit over user safety and that the company’s executives were well aware of their sites’ potential for harm.
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