If there’s an award for the social media platform that has faced the most controversy and backlash of late, it has to be Instagram. Amid hot controversy and negative publicity, the social media platform has reached a new milestone after reaching 2 billion active users, according to sources.
The new milestone comes on the heels of the platform’s CEO Adam Mosseri being dragged to Congress for a series of controversial accusations. In the past few months, Instagram has been in the negative media majorly for reasons associated with child protection online. This has also affected the image of its parent company Meta (formerly known as Facebook). Even as it remains on the bad side of the public, Instagram remains an important subsidiary of its parent company Meta.
In June 2018, Instagram hit the 1 billion monthly active users and that was the last time the company made its user numbers public. The company has also been clandestine with its growth as it seems to want to be out of the eyes of regulators.
Instagram’s new milestone of 2 billion monthly active users was revealed by employees who didn’t want to be named because they weren’t authorized to speak on the matter. According to them, they got the information from internal discussions. Instagram hitting 2 billion monthly active users is feasible because of the rate at which the company has been adding users since it first announced that it hit 1 billion monthly active users. According to one of the sources, Instagram hit this milestone before Facebook was renamed Meta.
David Heger, an analyst at Edward Jones commented that “that’s a pretty significant compound annual growth rate of users”. “It tells me that even with the challenge of TikTok recently, Instagram is still certainly relevant to people”, he added.
