One Quarter Of The World Is Using Facebook

Facebook’s path to world domination is no joke. According to the social media company’s latest quarterly report (which also shows massive gains in income), there are now 1.79 billion Facebook users logging on every month. As New York Magazine notes, this is equivalent to almost a quarter of the Earth’s population.

Even more incredible is the fact that almost 66 percent of those active Facebook users that log onto the platform every single day. That’s a lot of birthday notifications.

While this monumental milestone may seem shocking — it reflects a 16 percent increase in monthly Facebook users since Q3 2015 — it’s the result of a sharp increase in people accessing the social media site on their phones across the world. And given that more than half of all the world’s internet users are on Facebook, it’s pretty on par with Facebook’s mission, as Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly proven in his expansion initiatives.

One such project is Free Basics, a Facebook-backed project run by Internet.org that aims to promote universal internet access. So far, it has helped make Facebook more widely available in 38 countries.

But there has been resistance to Facebook’s expansion into less-developed territories. Earlier this year, Zuckerberg was foiled in his plan to bestow free internet access to users in rural India. The Free Basics offer eschewed the tenants of net neutrality, putting stipulations on which the sites Indian users would be able to access. Naturally, Facebook was among the sites that would have been most easily available to users.

This summer, Facebook also began testing a solar-powered drone that, according to Zuckerberg, aims to “help more of the 4 billion people who are not online access all the opportunities of the internet.” (Those opportunities very likely being Facebook-related.)