Facebook → Meta, Twitter → X
When Facebook renamed itself to Meta (2021) and Twitter renamed itself to X (2023), the underlying entities did not change. The infrastructure, legal entities, and systems continued to exist.
But millions of existing records still reference the original names.
News articles, research papers, legal documents, and databases continue to refer to Facebook and Twitter. These references do not automatically update.
As a result, identity becomes fragmented across names.
This reveals a structural property of digital systems:
Names are attributes. Identity persists independently from naming.
Infrastructure that relies on stable identifiers preserves continuity across renames.
Infrastructure that relies on names does not.