Instagram is rumored to already have two billion monthly active users. This news came from an Instagram employee who did not wish to be named to CNBC.
Instagram last announced its active user count in 2018, when they hit the one billion mark. Three years later, that number has doubled to two billion, as quoted from The Verge, Thursday (16/12/2021).
The Instagram employee who leaked the information to CNBC said they learned the information from an internal conversation. One employee said Instagram's user count hit two billion about a week before Facebook changed its name to Meta in October 2021.
Instagram itself was first launched in 2010. Two years later, this photo-sharing application was acquired by Facebook for a dowry of USD 1 billion.
With this achievement, Instagram is further away from TikTok which is its main competitor. In September last year, this application made by ByteDance has one billion users.
Although this achievement is quite impressive, Instagram doesn't seem to want to rush to celebrate and announce it to the public. The reason is that Instagram is currently under the attention of regulators thanks to internal documents leaked by whistleblower and former Facebook employee Frances Haugen.
The document reveals how an internal study of Instagram found that the app has negative effects on adolescent mental health, such as exacerbating body image problems among female teen users. Not long ago, Instagram was also accused of making it easier for teenage users to find accounts for drug dealers.
Regulators in the United States also asked Instagram to stop the Instagram for Kids project aimed at users of children under the age of 13. Instagram said they would temporarily suspend the project, but would not shut it down completely.
Meanwhile, Instagram recently released several security features to improve user privacy and safety. One of them is through the Take a Break feature which encourages users to take a short break if they have been opening Instagram for too long.
They will also launch a parental control feature that will allow parents to see how much time their child is spending on Instagram, limit the duration of use, and get notified if a child reports someone's account.
