Facebook announced Wednesday the site experienced an increase in active users in the first quarter of 2018, reversing a decline in users from the quarter before as the company is under siege from privacy complaints and censorship allegations.
“Despite facing important challenges, our community continues to grow,” Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement posted to Facebook.
Facebook added 48 million daily users worldwide from the last quarter of 2017 to the first of 2018. With an increase of 1.45 billion daily users and 2.2 billion average monthly users, Facebook’s user activity has increased by 13 percent already from last year.
The social media giant also has had a sales increase of 47 percent in this quarter, hitting $13 billion.
Facebook’s earnings report is the first one since news of Cambridge Analytica obtaining millions of users’ personal information through a Facebook feature surfaced last month.
After reports of the surge, Facebook’s stock shot up Wednesday by 7 percent.
“Our focus in 2018 is to keep people safe, and to keep building the experiences people expect from us,” Zuckerberg said. “We are taking a broader view of our responsibility — to not only give people powerful tools but to make sure these tools are used for good.”
Zuckerberg appeared before Congress earlier this month to talk about how Cambridge Analytica was able to collect and use data to advance its political agenda, and the implications the data breach had on Facebook as well as other social media sites.
