Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez slams Facebook as 'a cancer to democracy' after Meta rebrand

• Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called Facebook a "cancer to democracy."
• She made the comments after Facebook announced it would change its name to Meta.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York had some harsh words for Facebook after its name change to Meta on 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 tweeted in response to the news.

-Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) October 28, 2021

Facebook on Thursday said it would change its name to Meta, which underscores its efforts to build a virtual space populated by digital avatars that Mark Zuckerberg calls the metaverse. The company's services, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, will now exist under the Meta umbrella, but the company said it corporate structure wasn't changing.

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Facebook will start trading under the new stock ticker MVRS in December.

The name change came amid a firestorm of revelations about Facebook's business practices detailed in thousands of pages of documents leaked to the press. The documents, provided to the media and US government by the former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen, paint a picture of a company that struggles to stem misinformation and illegal and dangerous activity on its platform, especially outside the US.

Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat, has been critical of Facebook and other tech giants in the past. Following Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' journey to space in July, she blasted the online retailer's low wages and "inhumane workplace." Earlier in October, she criticized Facebook's "monopolistic mission" as having "incredibly destructive effects on free society and democracy."