Facebook’s rapid growth raises questions on irresponsible use

Facebook Inc said on Tuesday that two billion people are regularly using its flagship service, marching past another milestone in its growth from a college curiosity in the United States to the world’s largest social media network.

Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg disclosed the number to his followers in a Facebook post. “It’s an honour to be on this journey with you,” he wrote.

The user base is bigger than the population of any single country, and of six of the seven continents. It represents more than a quarter of the world’s 7.5 billion people.

This underscores the increasing calls from various stakeholders for Facebook to take more responsibility for the content that lives on its platforms, given the potentially outsize social and political implications.

Facebook defines a monthly active user as a registered Facebook user who logged in and visited Facebook through its website or a mobile device, or used its Messenger app, in the past 30 days.

It does not include people who use the Instagram or WhatsApp networks but not Facebook. The company said in May that duplicate accounts, according to an estimate from last year, may have represented some six per cent of its worldwide user base.

The social network’s user population dwarfs that of similar companies. Twitter Inc reported in April monthly active users of 328 million, while Snapchat had 166 million daily users at the end of the first quarter.

WeChat, a unit of Tencent Holdings Ltd and a widely used service in China, said in May that it had 938 million monthly active users in the first quarter.

Facebook had 1.94 billion people using its service monthly as of March 31, an increase of 17 per cent from a year earlier. It reached one billion in October 2012.

The company, which Zuckerberg started in 2004 in his college dorm room, uses its huge size advantage to lure advertisers, offering them highly targeted marketing capabilities based on its data about users.

The number of advertisers topped five million in April, the company said. Facebook’s growth has increasingly come from outside the United States, Canada and Europe.

Three years ago, those regions accounted for some 38 per cent of users, compared with about 30 per cent in the first quarter of this year.

To increase penetration rates in developing nations, Facebook has rolled out pared-down versions of its apps that use less data, and it has been developing solar-powered drones to extend Internet connectivity around the planet.

But with Facebook’s growth come concerns over the responsibilities the company should bear given its potentially outsize influence on social and even political affairs.

It has been argued that fake news spread via Facebook influenced the voting public in the recent United States presidential elections. Facebook Live has been hit by controversy as users have taken to it to stream disturbing and sometimes violent content.

The rise of the so-called Islamic State has also been linked with more sophisticated use of Internet and social media platforms such as Facebook.

Despite criticism, Facebook seems to be growing aware of the grave responsibilities that come with its global spread.

The company has a new socially-focused mission statement, to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together”.

In a recent speech at Harvard, Zuckerberg detailed a dream of a world in which “every single person has a sense of purpose”.

The company has also been more active in fighting fake news on both sides of the Atlantic — targeting 30,000 fake accounts and working with journalists to correct false claims that arise from content on its site.

Taking this mission of responsibility a step further, Facebook this week announced a partnership with fellow Internet giants Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube that is supposed to counter terrorism.

The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism will see the company share best practices and jointly develop technologies to pinpoint problematic content on their platforms.

The companies will also commission research “to inform” their “counter-speech efforts” while hosting learning workshops for stakeholders.