Reports indicate Instagram now has two (2) billion monthly active users.
This is despite the many scandals and accusations against the social media platform.
Recall that many people have accused Instagram and other subsidiaries of Meta of negatively impacting the youths.
In fact, Meta is being under scrutiny for months now over potentially causing harm to kids and teens.
Also, the US lawmakers have beamed an investigative searchlight on Meta and its subsidiaries.
However, despite the accussations an condemnations of Instagram, it has grown its userbase to billions.
Some anonymous employees revealed this to CNBC.
Meanwhile, despite the userbase growth, experts say Meta will not officially disclose this growth level.
Instagram last announced size of its userbase in 2018.
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It had done this when the platform revealed that it had 1 billion users.
It took three years for Instagram to hit the 2 billion mark.
The employees who tipped off CNBC say that they found out about the number during internal conversations — one staff member reportedly told CNBC that Instagram surpassed the threshold around a week before Facebook’s decision to change its name to Meta.
Instagram has been desperately trying to stay ahead of TikTok, the fast-growing short-form video app that just crossed 1 billion users in September.
This is coming just three years after the app merged with Musical.ly and became widely available.
While Instagram is still outpacing the platform, for now, it’s unclear how long that will last.
Instagram has been rolling out feature after feature that just seems like a TikTok knockoff, and its newly released Reels Visual Reply is just the latest example.
That said, Instagram isn’t really in the position to brag about its userbase right now, since its own internal study found that the platform may exacerbate body image issues in young girls and has also been accused of making it easier for teens to find drugs. In an attempt to counteract these issues, the platform has rolled out a “take a break feature,” which prompts users to close the app if they’ve been on it for a set period of time, and also announced that it’s introducing new parental controls.
The Verge reached out to Instagram with a request for comment but didn’t immediately hear back.
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