​More people coming out on Facebook than ever before

More so than ever, Americans are coming out on Facebook. The number of users coming out each day is on track to be three times what it was a year ago, the new research shows.

In honor of this year’s celebration of National Coming Out Day on October 15, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) published a report showing the number of people who have “come out” in the past year. These were seen in states like New York and Nevada having twice the number of profiles identifying people as LGBT as Texas did. Investigators have noticed a 250% surge among these users, an unprecedented value if we were to compare it with previous years. That represents a huge uptick over the past 12 months, and brings the total number of Americans who have come out on Facebook to more than 6 million to date.

Of course, not all parts of the country are equally friendly and tolerant of LGBT people, and the company has also revealed which states have the most, and least, out LGBT people. In the past year, Facebook reported that about 800,000 Americans expressed their same-gender attraction or custom gender. The study defined “coming out” as users changing their profile to reflect a same-sex attraction, or who specified a custom gender using the field Facebook introduced in February 2014. However, “on the day of the Supreme Court ruling, this ratio was double, one out of every five people”. Moreover, with judicial support coming from the highest court in the land, “support for LGBT groups has likewise increased”.

This week, in observance of Coming Out Day on Sunday and Spirit Day on Thursday, Facebook’s blog released data showing just how much LGBT Facebook is in lock-step with LGBT history. Support has increased by almost 25% over the past year, and also spiked sharply after the Supreme Court’s ruling, the social networker said. Additionally, 5.7 million Americans are fans of one of the roughly 300 LGBT pages on the network. “When people know us, they support us”, Brown added.

Research from Facebook shows that more and more people on the platform are opening up about the gender and sexuality.