Given that there are ~ 300M americans and facebook has ~850M users, my guess is that most of their userbase is overseas (and oftentimes falling prey to the whole "americans use it, so I should also be using it" mentality)
> (and oftentimes falling prey to the whole "americans use it, so I should also be using it" mentality)
That's a pretty low option of foreigners; in practice I think they take which bits of American culture they like, adapt it if necessary and ignore the rest. I would guess most of FB's non-USA users use it for the same reason USA-users do; its good at what it does, and all their friends use it.
I suspect there are a lot of throw-away lurker accounts created merely to sign into something that needed a Facebook sign-in (typically a Google result). I've created a few of those myself. I do not have a "real" Facebook account, and I have no plans to create one.
Plus lots of Facebook games encourage you to spam your friends daily for rewards. I know there are people who want the rewards but don't want to spam their friends: I'd love to know how many Facebook accounts are created simply as dummy accounts to send spam to.
For a long time Facebook wasn't available over seas. Facebook started with only US colleges, then high schools. It only opened up to people outside the US about 3 years ago I think so I would assume a large percentage of its user base is american.
This is as insightful a theory as saying Facebook launched 7 years ago and now it has 850 million users, so on its first year at Harvard it must have gained 121.4 million users.
