The one day that sparked an amazing rise in people coming out on Facebook

After the Supreme Court upheld same-sex marriage rights nationwide, there was an enormous spike in the number of Americans coming out on Facebook.

Facebook

Those findings come from a new report by Facebook analyzing the Supreme Court decision's effects on social media, concluding that about 2.5 times as many people came out on June 26, the day of the ruling, as did on October 11, 2014, which was National Coming Out Day.

This makes sense. Not only did the Court's decision show gay, lesbian, and bisexual people that they're more accepted in the US, but it also led to a wave of people posting about their support for marriage equality on Facebook. So people felt more comfortable coming out.

"Over the past year, approximately 800,000 Americans updated their profile to express a same-gender attraction or custom gender," Facebook found. "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. As the chart demonstrates, the number of people on Facebook coming out per day is on track to be three times what it was a year ago."

But the ruling also had another effect: It led to a big spike in the number of people following US LGBTQ groups on Facebook.

Facebook

So not only did more people come out on Facebook, but the Supreme Court decision led more people to connect to LGBTQ advocacy groups — and that could help these groups land more major victories, like the marriage equality ruling, in the future.

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