Facebook defines active users as people who visited the site or its messaging app through their desktop computer or mobile app in the past 30 days.
For obvious privacy reasons, it does not make its user data public, so it's impossible to independently verify the company's user counts.
Any service growing that quickly is bound to experience some mishaps — recall that the tagline for “The Social Network,” the 2010 movie about Facebook's rise, was “You don't get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies.”
In recent months, Facebook has come under criticism for, among other things, suppressing conservative viewpoints, enabling suicide and murder, killing journalism, making people unhealthy and destroying Democracy as we know it.
Caught up in the din of daily Facebook controversies, it’s easy to forget that none of us not even Facebook — have any idea what it truly means to have a quarter of humanity plugged into a single product, governed by a single set of rules and norms, uploading deeply personal information to a single database, making a single company the gateway between ourselves and the advertisers who want us to buy stuff.
We just go with it, riding the tide of likes and shares into whatever Facebook's future holds for us.
By Christopher Ingraham –Washington Post
Ed: Zimbabwe is estimated to have about 860 000 facebook users down from 1.1 million in 2013.
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