• by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, April 26, 2017

Another day, another milestone for Facebook’s favorite son.

Yes, Instagram has surpassed 700 million monthly active users, the Facebook unit announced on Wednesday.

And, according to internal calculations, the picture-based social network is adding MAUs at a record rate.

Indeed, “The last 100 million of you joined faster than ever,” Instagram boasts in a new post.

The network attributes its accelerated growth to global expansion, along with the success of new features like Stories, live video, and disappearing messages in Direct.

Stories -- which lets people share moments from their day in slide-show form -- is proving to be a particularly big success for Instagram. Since January, the number of people using the feature every day has ballooned from 150 million to 200 million, Instagram recently revealed.

Since late 2016, meanwhile, the number of people using Direct -- Instagram’s messaging feature -- has grown from 300 million to 375 million, per internal figures.

Facebook is increasingly relying on Instagram to drive revenue growth. In fact, the picture-based network will make up 20% of Facebook’s domestic mobile revenue this year -- up from 15%, last year -- eMarketer estimates.

As Instagram continues to go more mainstream, it is becoming more cautious about the type of content it allows on its platform.

To that end, the network recently started filtering select images that it considers to be ‘sensitive” fare.

Also, Instagram recently began letting users disable comments on individual posts, and invited its entire community to moderate comments on their posts as they see fit.