A new study indicates that almost one million LGBTQ Americans used Facebook to come out this year.
Gay Star News reports that 800,000 Americans in total came out on Facebook over twelve months, posting to their profile expressly to reveal same-sex attraction or specifying their preferred gender.
That’s nearly three times what the number was last year.
The report states, “The most obvious increase is seen following the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v Hodges. On a typical day, one out of every ten people who change their ‘interested in’ status on Facebook do so to reflect a same-gender interest. On the day of the Supreme Court ruling, this ratio was double, one out of every five people.’
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Over 26 million people displayed a rainbow filter on their profile picture following the landmark June 26 decision.
6 million Americans in total have come out on Facebook, and 78% of those people did so since the beginning of 2012. The total number of fans who “liked” LGBTQ pages increased nearly 25% over the last year.
The study states:
“The sheer magnitude of this increase suggests that the LGBT movement has made significant strides in recent years. Again, we see an increase in fan numbers around the June 26 Supreme Court ruling: in fact, fan pages for LGBT-rights groups acquired over 150,000 new fans during the five days following the decision.
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).
