Facebook has crunched the numbers on its LGBT community and found that a large number of people — around 800,000, in fact — have come out in the last year alone via the social network.
The landmark Supreme Court decision supporting same-sex marriage helped the numbers, but Facebook is also noting an overall positive trend toward people coming out online and more support for LGBT groups’ pages, too.
“Not only has the total number of Americans who have come out on Facebook risen dramatically, but so has the number coming out each day,” Facebook reports. “The number of people on Facebook coming out per day is on track to be three times what it was a year ago.”
In the post, Facebook states that they looked at the total number of people who came out each day, defining “ ‘coming out’ as (1) updating one’s profile to express a same-gender attraction or (2) specifying a custom gender (this tool, which was introduced in February 2014, allows people to better express their gender identity on Facebook).” Previously, the social network had come under scrutiny when it asked users to strictly identify as “male” or “female.”
Facebook even made some handy graphs detailing the growth. This first one shows the total number of Americans who have come out since National Coming Out Day in 2014. You can see that June 26 spiked — that’s the day the Supreme Court’s ruling came out. See below:
Support for LGBT groups has risen dramatically, too, Facebook stating that “5.7 million Americans are fans of at least one of the 300 most popular LGBT pages”:
To date, Facebook says it has 6 million Americans identifying as LGBT, and that “approximately 78% made this change to their profile since the beginning of 2012.”
Facebook considers that number an “underestimate” because it’s only representing those who are out on the network, but if nationwide support for LGBT rights continues on this positive trajectory, this is one Facebook trend that should keep on the upswing.
