Are we supposed to believe Zuckerberg Inc didn’t make the decision to become META back before they bought the company which owned the rights to the name?

Thursday marked a new chapter in Facebook’s ongoing attempt to deal with the fallout from recent revelations about its inadequate content moderation role in sparking a mental health crises, decisions to prioritize engagement over safety, facilitation of genocide, and more: it changed its name to Meta Platforms, Inc—”Meta” for short…

As it turns out, changing Facebook’s brand to Meta required sunsetting an identically-named academic software company…

Meta is a Canadian scientific literature analysis company that was founded in 2009, bought by the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) in 2017, and on the day of Facebook’s rebrand the Initiative announced it will shut down by 2022. Meta was the first acquisition of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and controls the URL meta.org. Notably, Facebook—er, Meta—owns meta.com.

Jeff MacGregor, CZI’s vice president of communications for science, told CNet that the organization’s assets were being transferred to Facebook but didn’t offer any specifics about the deal…In a statement explaining why its reasoning for shutting Meta, CZI alluded to “focusing” the energies of its staff, bringing “immediate value” and “greater opportunity for outsized impact” to the table.

Folks who believe these explanations, rationales, are also likely to be sitting around next April waiting for the Easter Bunny. Yum! Chocolate Meta-eggs.