The company changed its name from Facebook
to Meta Platform in October last year in a rebrand that focuses on building the
"metaverse," a shared virtual environment that it bets will be the
successor to the mobile Internet.
The current ticker 'FB' has been in use
since the company's initial public offering in 2012.
The company has recently introduced several
other changes. A few days back, Meta Platforms said that it will share more
data on targeting choices made by advertisers running political and social-issue
ads in its public ad database.
Meta said it would also include detailed
targeting information for these individual ads in its "Facebook Open
Research and Transparency" database used by academic researchers, in an
expansion of a pilot launched last year.
"Instead of analysing how an ad was
delivered by Facebook, it's really going and looking at an advertiser strategy
for what they were trying to do," said Jeff King, Meta's vice president of
business integrity, in a phone interview.
The social media giant has faced pressure
in recent years to provide transparency around targeted advertising on its
platforms, particularly around elections. In 2018, it launched a public ad
library, though some researchers criticised it for glitches and a lack of
detailed targeting data.
Meta said the ad library will soon show a
summary of targeting information for social issue, electoral or political ads
run by a page.
"For example, the Ad Library could
show that over the last 30 days, a Page ran 2,000 ads about social issues,
elections or politics, and that 40 percent of their spend on these ads was
targeted to 'people who live in Pennsylvania' or 'people who are interested in
politics,'" Meta said in a blog post. © Reuters