Facebook, LGBT and the numbers behind it all

On Friday, the American Supreme Court decreed that same sex marriage is a constitutional right. It was a quantum leap for LGBT rights worldwide and people from every corner of the earth celebrated this iconic moment. Facebook, always known for having their finger on the pulse, enabled users to modify their profile pictures, in a manner that left the resulting edited photo carry a rainbow tinged varnish, the insignia for the LGBT rights movement. In a stunning display of solidarity, over millions changed their profile photo in the first few hours after the feature was enabled and the internet was painted in the colors of the rainbow.

The last time such a thing happened was in 2013, when 3 million people changed their profile images to a red equals sign — the logo of the Human Rights Campaign — as a way to support marriage equality. After the first wave of joy, solidarity and bonhomie died done, a wave of hostility soon emerged and soon after this a quieter wave of academic skepticism surfaced. It all started when an MIT professor changed his profile picture and jokingly said “This is probably a Facebook experiment!”. Well, the truth is, Facebook’s data scientists have attracted public scrutiny for conducting experiments on its users: tracking their moods and voting behavior. Though, much less attention has been given to their ongoing work to better understand collective action and social change online. After all, isn’t it fascinating to gauge the impact of this collective phenomenon, often dismissed as ‘slacktivism’?

For many people, changing their profile pictures was a true act of courage. It was all about coming out in our social context and stating that this was the stand you were taking. However, collectivism often has its pitfalls, and this often results in the much maligned slacktivism. Facebook’s researchers classified profile images from over 3 million users in March 2013, along with 106 million users who were exposed to those changed profiles. Next, they predicted the likelihood of someone changing their profile to an equality image, depending on how many friends they had seen make the change. They found that while someone’s likelihood to participate varied based on several factors — a person’s political affiliations, religion, and age, for example — the likelihood to change one’s profile image was greater with more exposures to changes by friends.

However, it is not a cause for worry for internet activism yet. Whatever your views on Facebook researching behavioral patterns of its users are, the truth remains that their findings will be very interesting.

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