We just shared our community update and quarterly results. Our community now includes about 2.7 billion people around the world who use Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or Messenger each month.
I discussed our plans to build a privacy-focused social platform. We already have public spaces -- the digital equivalents of the town square -- and we think there should be a digital equivalent of the living room as well. I'll talk more about how we're building this at F8 next week.
I also gave an update on how we’re thinking about some of the important social issues facing the internet, including how regulation can help keep harmful content to a minimum, protect elections, secure people's privacy, and encourage data portability. There are hard questions to get right here and I talked about some of the real tradeoffs between important values.
This is an important time for Facebook and I'm excited about the direction we're heading. You can read my full update below.
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This was a strong quarter, and our community and business continue to grow. There are now around 2.7 billion people using Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or Messenger each month, and more than 2.1 billion people are using at least one every day.
We're continuing to see fast adoption of stories -- with each of our three stories experiences -- Facebook and Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp -- having more than half a billion daily actives.
Since our last call, I've written about some major updates on the future of our services and how we're thinking about some of the important social issues facing the internet. So I'll focus my time today on these, starting with our privacy-focused vision for the future of social networking.
The basic idea here is that in our lives we all have public spaces like the town square and private spaces like our living rooms. In our digital lives, we also need both public and private spaces.
For the last 15 years, Facebook and Instagram have become the digital equivalents of the town square where you can do almost anything you want with lots of people at once -- stay in touch with your friends, meet new people, find communities that share your interests, start businesses, buy and sell things, and organize fundraisers for causes. They aren't just tools for sharing one thing; they're these whole rich platforms for lots of ways to interact in larger communities.
Today, people increasingly want the intimacy of connecting privately as well. So I think there also needs to be a digital equivalent of the living room -- a platform just as built out with all of the ways you'd want to interact privately. We already see that messages, small groups and stories are by far the fastest growing areas of online communication. And we also know that people want additional tools for private interactions like payments and commerce.
I expect the digital town squares like Facebook and Instagram will always be important and will only continue to grow in importance. There's a lot more to build there as well and I'm excited about that. But over time I believe there's an even bigger opportunity with the digital living room to build a platform focused on privacy. We all need to communicate privately, and this service could be even more important in our lives. So I think we should focus our efforts on building this privacy-focused platform.
Our plan is to build this the way we've developed WhatsApp: focus on the most fundamental and private use case -- messaging -- make it as secure as possible with end-to-end encryption, and then build more ways for people to interact on top of that.
This privacy-focused platform will be built around several principles:
Private interactions. You should have simple, intimate spaces where you have complete confidence that what you say and do is private.
Encryption. Your private communications should be secure, and end-to-end encryption prevents anyone -- including even us -- from seeing what you share.
Reducing permanence. You shouldn't have to worry about what you share coming back to hurt you later, so we won't keep around messages or stories for longer than necessary.
Safety. You should expect we'll do everything we can to keep you safe on our services, within the bounds of an encrypted service. So we're taking the time to get this right upfront before we ship this platform.
Interoperability. You should be able to use any of our apps to reach your friends, and you should be able to communicate across our networks easily and securely.
And finally, secure data storage. You should expect that we won’t store sensitive data in countries where it might be improperly accessed because of weak rule of law or governments that can forcibly get access to your data.
Over the next few years, we're going to rebuild more of our services around these ideas. There are a lot of open questions and real tradeoffs on important social issues, so we're committed to working openly on this and consulting with experts and governments as we go.
Now, I know one of the questions we've gotten frequently is about how this will affect our business model, so I'll address that here. The reality is any impact will be longer term and we don't know exactly how this will play out yet. But on some of the questions like whether encrypting content will hurt our business, I'm more confident that won't be a significant issue. We don't use the content of messages between people to target ads today, so encrypting that content won't change what we do. It will strengthen people's privacy without meaningfully affecting our business. Similarly, reducing the permanence of data may have some impact, but we've generally found that more recent data is more useful for recommendations anyway, so this is another step that should have a much bigger impact on strengthening people's privacy than it will have on our business. Our stance on data localization is a risk. That is, if we get blocked in a major country, that will hurt our community and our business. But our principles on data localization aren't new and this has always been a risk.
Some people have asked whether more use of private social platforms will replace the more public platforms. Our privacy roadmap applies to all our products, but we believe there needs to continue to be both the digital town square and the digital living room. As private platforms have grown, in some cases we've seen some cannibalization of the more public platforms in countries like India, where WhatsApp is very popular, but the broader pattern across the world is that people want to use both private and public platforms -- so I believe building out this private social platform is a much greater opportunity than it is a risk.
In thinking about the opportunity and impact to our business, by far the most important factor will be whether people choose to use our products and whether we can build the leading private social platforms in most countries. Now remember, we are not currently the leading messaging platform in either the United States, China, or Japan, which are the three largest economies in the world. Our apps aren't in China, but innovating and succeeding in the other countries is going to be very important. People want a private social platform that is as strong on privacy as possible, so delivering this is both in the interests of our community and our business.
As always, our first step is going to be to focus on building the services people want. We're still in the early stages of developing this, and we'll share more as our plans develop.
The other piece I published in the last month was about the four areas of internet regulation I think would be most helpful around content, elections, privacy, and data portability.
The reason I wrote this is because I've spent most of the last couple of years focused on addressing the important social issues around the internet, and while I'm proud of the progress we've made, these are areas where it doesn't feel right for a private company to make such important policy decisions by ourselves. If the rules for the internet were being written from scratch today, I don't think people would want private companies to be making so many decisions around speech, elections, and data privacy without a more robust democratic process.
For harmful content, I think there should be a public process for determining what's allowed and required for keeping harmful content to a minimum. That could be through government or industry, but having common standards is critical since people use so many different services to share content.
For elections, there have long been laws defining what is political advertising, but we need to update those regulations to reflect today's threats like the ways that foreign nation states try to interfere in elections now. Those threats are often not covered by today's laws and I think we'd be better off if companies didn't define those policies themselves.
For privacy, I believe it would be positive if more countries adopted regulation like GDPR as a common framework. At this point, realistically, most countries will adopt privacy regulation, and the most likely alternative to a global framework like GDPR is the fragmentation of the internet -- and more countries following the approach of authoritarian regimes adopting strict data localization policies where governments can more easily access people's data, and I'm highly concerned about that future.
For data portability, if you have data in one service, you should be able to move it to another. But we need a common understanding of nuanced questions like what is your data and what is someone else's? If I share my birthday with you, is that now your data that you should be able to bring to your calendar app so it can remind you later? Or is that only my data? And if a platform like Facebook facilitates data portability and you’re bringing data to another app, whose responsibility is it if that app misuses your data? The absence of clear rules discourages companies like ours from building tools to make it easier to move data between apps.
These questions involve difficult tradeoffs. We can't have complete free speech but no hate. We can't have complete privacy while also stopping every safety threat. We can't tell platforms to keep everyone's data private, but then expect a broad definition of data portability for research or competition. The values and equities at stake are too important and too conflicting for any company to balance them in a way that everyone will be comfortable with. So part of building trust will be deferring to a public process on how to make these tradeoffs.
I understand that any regulation may hurt our business. But I think it's necessary. Getting these issues right is more important than our interests. And I believe that regulation will help establish trust when people know that the right systems of governance and accountability are in place. Over the long term, I believe that that increase in the trustworthiness of the internet can have a much larger positive impact for our community and our business than any short term hit that we’re going to take.
Overall, this is an important time for Facebook. I'm excited about the direction we're heading and looking forward to discussing how we should address some of these issues more directly.
As always, thank you for being on this journey with us.
