Facebook population hits all time high of more than 2bn

FACEBOOK has reached another milestone, announcing that it now has more than two billion users.

Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg (right) said the new benchmark was reached early yesterday. He added in a Facebook post that he is proud of the role his company is playing in connecting people around the world.

More than 175 million people declare they “love” something on the site daily and an average of more than 800m people hit Facebook’s like button, the company stated. Facebook users are likely to see a personalised video celebrating the milestone in the next few days.

The company, based in Menlo Park, California, is putting more emphasis on creating virtual communities within the site while it is also working to reduce violent, hateful and misleading content on the service. Facebook also said it has deleted about 66,000 posts a week in the last two months as the social media giant cracks down on what it deems to be hate speech.