I wonder how many of those accounts are fake / sockpuppet / astroturf / paid likes
For a billion users, they need 1/6 of the worlds population. No way do they have that.
How many kids under 7? under 5? in the world. Don't have accounts. How many elderly over 80? 70? don't have accounts.
What is the % of non-"developed" countries? Not 1/6
Compared to people running multiple accounts (personal / professional/ seo accounts / spam accounts), now that I have heard of.
Regardless, they still have a hell of a lot of users, but 1b real, I doubt
She alone had about 15 of them, she worked in a company that had about 10 employees that did the same thing as she did.
The company that she worked for, was one of the smallest ones, there are several others that are much, much bigger.
Edit: And most of my friends have two or three real FB accounts, one for close friends, one for older relatives/their parents' friends, and one for work acquaintances/bosses. I am in the minority in only maintaining one real account.
Beside creating false rumours for PR objectives, another use of the accounts was try to reach 5000 people in them (I dunno now, but when she was my GF facebook converted people accounts with 5000 friends into pages with 5000 followers, then ad companies could sell those to kickstart company pages).
Obvious guesses (with prior evidence!) is: Government astroturfing & information gathering (hot girl friends you + gov't gains access to your "private" content), and brand astroturfing.
Yes but did she connect to all of them on monday by a mean or another?
I think that's the fact it was on a single day that makes this number impressive.
To do this they created a program that searched the internet for pictures of someone in various situations, then prepared a easy-to-use library of photos to be uploaded every "x" period to look like a real person.
The account operator (or operators for some particularly prized accounts) would then log-in, post the photo scheduled, and write a post on the fly, the best operators could make the fake account look like a real person, fooling not only other users but bots, tracking software and whatnot.
The accounts that looked particularly real were very useful for PR efforts, some of the biggest clients were appliances manufacturers (example of one of them: GE), and one of the uses was for example one day try to distract the public after some bad news about washing machines causing accidents went viral, or try to create a counter-post that is viral too (in the washing machine case it worked, the viral post stopped being viral in 3 or 4 hours, and not even me remember what was the issue with the washing machines).