The #deletefacebook campaign may have grabbed lots of headlines, but the truth is that Facebook has seen an increase in US and Canadian active users in the first quarter of 2018.

The company has confirmed that it has reversed its first ever decline in daily active users and returned to DAU growth between January and March, albeit with an incremental climb from 184m to 185m.

48m new users were added globally in the period, too. The site now boasts 1.45bn DAUs and 2.2bn MAUs – both figures are up 13 per cent year-on-year.

Revenues for the period were up 50 per cent at $12bn. Interestingly 91 per cent of these revenues now come from mobile advertising. In 2012 that figure stood at just 14 per cent, and last year it was at 85 per cent.

No advertiser exodus

"Despite facing important challenges, our community and business are off to a strong start in 2018," founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said. "We are taking a broader view of our responsibility and investing to make sure our services are used for good. But we also need to keep building new tools to help people connect, strengthen our communities, and bring the world closer together."

COO Sheryl Sandberg added in an investor call that Facebook had only heard from "a handful of advertisers" who paused their spending in the wake of the recent troubles, and one of these has already returned to the platform.

The company did concede however that new European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) laws could lead to a pause in European growth or even a decline in the next quarter, although Facebook does apparently not see it as a “doomsday scenario”.