Fresh off the heels of a new mission statement — the slightly less nebulous than before “to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together” — Mark Zuckerberg announced today that Facebook officially has 2 billion monthly active users (that is, people who sign into the service once a month). “It’s an honor to be on this journey with you,” he wrote in a Facebook status about the milestone. Back in 2012, eight years after the company launched, Facebook hit a billion users.
So just how big is Facebook now? Very. By comparison, as of earlier this month, YouTube has 1.5 billion MAUs. Gmail reached the 1 billion figure last year. WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger are also in the billion-user club, as is the iPhone. Instagram has 700 million, as per a report from April. (That’s up from 600 million in December 2016.)
The only services that come close to Facebook? Google Android, which has over 2 billion users, and — we can presume — Google search, which Google says has over a billion, but surely has many more than that. And with all those users come even more opportunities for problems to arise — Facebook’s livestreaming feature has become a hotbed for violent and gruesome content in recent months, a known issue the company is trying to fix. (Bringing the world closer together comes at a cost, it would seem.) On the flip side, that’s 2 billion people who could be posting statuses about their Hogwarts houses. Which, frankly, also sounds bad.
