Facebook released a report Thursday that cites a coming out trend in social media to honor Spirit Day last Friday as well as National Coming Out Day from Oct. 11.
"Over the past year, approximately 800,000 Americans updated their profile to express a same-gender attraction or custom gender," Bogdon State and Nils Wernerfelt, researchers at Facebook's Research and Data Science division, said in an official statement. "Further, 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."
Statistically, the numbers are staggering because it translates to at least three cases of coming out in Facebook every day for this year. And this is exclusive of the number of already open homosexual Facebook users. All in all, the report reveals that at least 6 million accounts are identified as LGBT. The number of fans of the LGBT community has also increased to 25 percent, The Huffington Post noted.
The Facebook report cites the Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage last June as one of the major contributing factor for the uptick in LGBT numbers in the social media platform. On average, for the past year, one out of 10 people change their status to reflect same-gender interest. However, "on the day of the Supreme Court ruling, this ratio was double, one out of every five people. Additionally, in the days following the June 26 Supreme Court decision, we saw more than 26 million people display a rainbow filter on their profile picture," the researchers were said, USA Today reported.
