Investigators have noticed a 250% surge among these users, an unprecedented value if we were to compare it with previous years.
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It adds: “Over the past year, approximately 800,000 Americans updated their profile to express a same-gender attraction or custom gender”.
The result? Over the past year alone, the rate at which people “come out” on Facebook has doubled.
The number of people coming out on Facebook, of course, varies by region.
This is less than half of the number in states including New York and Nevada – where over 4 percent of people are openly LGBT. Alabama and Mississippi bring up the rear.
“On a typical day, one out of every 10 people who change their “interested in” status on Facebook do so to reflect a same-gender interest”, wrote Facebook Research’s Bogdan State and Nils Wernerfelt. In addition, there was a huge spike in status changes on the day the U.S. Supreme Court made marriage for same-sex couples legal nationwide.
‘While this event marked the largest single increase in support for LGBT pages, we also see spikes on the Sunday following World AIDS Day (1 December 2014) and on the day of oral arguments at the Supreme Court in the Obergefell case (28 April 2015 – though this effect may have been amplified due to Diane Sawyer’s interview of Caitlyn Jenner on 24 April)’. Currently, more than six million Americans have come out on Facebook. And a big credit for that should can also go to the growing support for LGBT rights. Around 5.7 million Americans support at least one of the top 300 most popular LGBT pages like those operated by the Humans Rights Campaign and GLAAD, the company says.
Support for LGBT groups on Facebook has also increased by about 25 percent in the past year.
Jay Brown, the director of the institution, has explained that Facebook decided to make this data public because they thought visibility will help the LGBT community. He thinks Facebook’s latest figures prove “just what a difference visibility makes to LGBT people”.
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The Supreme Court same-sex marriage ruling, and other milestones for the LGBT community, were reflected in Facebook’s coming out statistics for the past year. “And clearly social media is an incredible tool in making that possible”.
