Facebook breaks down marriage equality numbers

Who, how many, and where people changed their pictures this past week

With the Supreme Court hearing cases on California's Proposition 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act this past week, Facebook users took to showing their solidarity the only way they seem to know how: changing their profile pictures.

As I'm sure you saw over the last few days, many, many Facebook users changed their profile picture to this (or some variation of it) to show their support of marriage equality:

Now Facebook has some stats to share about who, how many, and where people changed their pictures.

While millions of U.S. Facebook users update their profile photos on a given day, the social network noted, the number shot up this past Tuesday, with 2.7 million people updating, a 120% increase from a week prior.

When broken down by age, users who are around 30 years old were the most like to have updated their picture, with 3.5%, while he percentage of self-reported men and women updating was roughly the same: 2.1% and 2.3%, respectively.

Facebook also broke the numbers down geographically, and (surprise, surprise!) people in California were much more likely to have changed their pictures than people in Mississippi.

The county that saw the largest increase was, interestingly, Washtenaw County, the home of Ann Arbor, Michigan and the University of Michigan, with  approximately 6.2% of Facebook users who logged in from this county changing their profile photos.

In fact, the majority of the top 25 countries with the largest percentage of support for the campaign were college towns (again, surprise, surprise!): Orange, home of the University of North Carolina; Durham, home of Duke University; Monroe, home of Indiana University; Johnson, home of the University of Iowa; Athens, home of Ohio Universityl Dane, home of the University of Wisconsin; Boulder, home of the University of Colorado; and Travis, home of the University of Texas at Austin.

San Francisco County, San Mateo County, and Washington, D.C. also showed strong support.

"For a long time, when people stood up for a cause and weren't all physically standing shoulder to shoulder, the size of their impact wasn’t immediately apparent. But today, we can see the spread of an idea online in greater detail than ever before. That’s data well worth finding," Eytan Bakshy, Data Scientist at Facebook, wrote.

Will this have any effect?

Studies have shown that, yes, Facebook users are actually fairly prone to being persuaded by their friends.

In this past election, a study led by the University of California, San Diego found that during the 2010 elections, when Facebook offered the clickable “I voted” button along with polling info and pictures of six friends who also said they voted, 600,000 Facebook users were randomly assigned a similar message—except that it didn’t include pictures of friends.  Another 600,000 users weren’t shown an Election Day message from Facebook at all.

Researchers compared the clicks against public records of who really voted and found that those who were shown the message with the pictures of their friends were, indeed, much more likely to actually go out and vote than those who were shown the message without the photos.  Interestingly, those who were shown the message without the photos were as likely to go out and vote as those who didn’t receive the message at all.

In all, about 300,000 more people voted in 2010 as a direct result of the Facebook message. 

So, chances are, putting up these types of memes does have an effect on the behavior of people who see them; chances are, though, that it will not do much for those nine people whose opinions matter most.

(As a side note, I have my own personal problems with this type of thing. I am a supporter of gay marriage, but I don't feel like I should be forced to tell anyone how I feel about it. Not that anyone is trying to, or am I embarrassed to have that belief, but I get the feeling that by NOT putting up this picture that I was somehow identifying myself as having the opposite view. Not only if that not fair, I consider it almost another form of bullying; a way to shame people into performing certain actions so as not be accused of harboring certain beliefs. But that's just my view.)

Anyway, let's end this on a funnier note. As with any Internet meme, there have been some greater parodies. Here are some of my favorites:

(Image source: https://readwrite.com)