A few months after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of gay marriage, more Americans are coming out on social media-- especially on Facebook.
The social media giant released figures on Oct. 15, which showed higher number of users from the US that have listed themselves as interested in same gender partners or in both female and male partners.
"We define "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)," Facebook's blog post said.
Facebook roughly estimated 800,000 US users updated their profiles in the last year. The most interesting part of the figures is that on June 25, people who came out were 2.5 times higher than on Oct. 11 of previous year, which is the National Coming Out Day.
"The number of people on Facebook coming out per day is on track to be three times what it was a year ago," according to the same blog post released by Facebook.
The report also included three major trends such as the steady growth in the number and rate of Facebook users coming out, the support that the LGBT groups are gaining have been increasing and that the Supreme Court Obergefell ruling had a strong effect on the number of people coming out on Facebook and support for LGBT groups.
Currently, about 6 million Americans on Facebook have come out. According to Facebook, the magnitude of this boost suggests that the LGBT movement has made significant strides in recent years. In addition, more or less 5.7 million Americans are fans of at least one of the 300 most popular LGBT pages. During the five days following Supreme Court decision, LGBT-rights fan pages acquired more than 150,000 new fans.
Do you have families and friends who came out on Facebook during the week of the Supreme Court decision?
