Facebook bigger than 3 of the world's biggest countries
MENLO PARK, Calif. -- Facebook (FB) now has more users than the population of the U.S., China and Brazil -- combined.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a blog post on Tuesday that the social network just eclipsed 2 billion active users. "We still have a long way to go to connect everyone," he added. "But we must do more than just connect -- we must bring people closer together."
In trumpeting the milestone, Facebook said 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 personalized video celebrating the milestone in the next few days, the company said.
Zuckerberg, along with co-founders Dustin Moskovitz and Eduardo Saverin, launched Facebook in early 2004. By the end of that year it would top 1 million users, eventually hitting 1 billion in 2012.
Of late, the Internet giant is putting more emphasis on creating virtual communities within the site while it also works to reduce violent, hateful and misleading content on the service.
Separately, Facebook said that it deleted about 66,000 posts a week in the last two months as the social media giant cracks down on what it deems to be hate speech.
The company said in a post that deleting posts can "feel like censorship," but that it is working on explaining its process better and improving its enforcement of hate speech.
"A post that calls all people of a certain race 'violent animals' or describes people of a certain sexual orientation as 'disgusting' can feel very personal and, depending on someone's experiences, could even feel dangerous," Facebook said.
