Facebook now has two billion users worldwide, but the social network warns that with great popularity comes great responsibility.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the new mark was reached last week, and in a Facebook post said that he’s proud of the role his company is playing in connecting people around the world.
Offering some deeper stats, Facebook says more than 175 million people declare they “love” something on the site daily and an average of more than 800 million people hit Facebook’s like button.
Facebook users will likely see a personalised video celebrating the milestone this week.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the milestone on the social network on Tuesday. “As of this morning, the Facebook community is now officially 2 billion people!” Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post. “We’re making progress connecting the world, and now let’s bring the world closer together.”
The announcement comes a few days after Facebook’s first-ever Community Summit in Chicago, where Zuckerberg unveiled a host of new tools to make it easier for admins of massive Facebook groups to grow and curate their communities.
More than 1 billion people use Facebook groups each month, making them a core component of the social network.
At the event, Zuckerberg also revealed the company’s new mission, “Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” Zuckerberg called the statement “an extension” of the company’s original mission of making the world “more open and connected.”
Facebook has set a goal to help 1 billion users become part of what Zuckerberg calls “meaningful groups,” in a push to reverse what has become a pronounced decline in community membership around the world. Stronger community engagement on and offline will be key to solving critical global problems like climate change and public health issues, Zuckerberg said.
“A more connected world is going to be necessary to take on the greatest opportunities and challenges for the next generation, everything from stopping climate change, to stopping pandemics, to funding research,” Zuckerberg said in an interview this month. “These are not fundamentally national problems anymore. In order to get there, you need to build a world where every person has a sense of support and purpose in their life so they don’t just focus narrowly on what’s going on in their lives, but can think about these broader issues as well.”
View the video broadcast from the communities summit below:
User activity on Facebook’s suite of apps continues to grow. Facebook -owned messaging apps WhatsApp and Messenger both have more than 1.2 billion monthly active users, and Instagram has more than 700 million monthly active users.
Facebook is now putting more emphasis on creating virtual communities within the site while it also works to reduce violent, hateful and misleading content on the service.