At a glanceThe company changed its corporate name to Meta Platforms in October 2021. The Facebook social-network product retained its own name.
What changed in October 2021
At Connect on October 28, 2021, the company introduced Meta as a brand bringing together its apps and technologies. Its SEC filing separately records the legal corporate-name change from Facebook, Inc. to Meta Platforms, Inc. on that date.
A corporate name identifies the business that owns products and enters agreements. A product name identifies a service people use. Those can be the same word, but they do not have to be. That distinction explains why someone could continue opening Facebook while reading business news about Meta.
Source [1] Source [2]Why old names still appear in documents
The announcement said the corporate structure was not changing and that the names of its apps would remain the same. A rebrand can therefore coexist with familiar app names, earlier legal documents and historical reports using the company's previous name.
When following an older link, attach the date to the terminology. A 2020 document referring to Facebook as a company and a later document referring to Meta may describe the same corporate lineage at different points. That is a historical naming question, not evidence that two unrelated companies own the same service.
Source [1]Reading the business story accurately
The SEC filing is useful because it records the legal event rather than asking readers to infer it from a logo. It also describes plans as they stood at the time. A proposed ticker change or a forecast in an old filing should not be read as a statement of today's trading arrangements.
For users, a company rebrand is also distinct from an individual product feature. NewsCubby's WhatsApp group-exit guide explains one such feature separately, while the Technology and Business sections provide routes to current coverage.
Source [2]