Queer (gay/lesbian…) Facebook

Yesterday the Danish Facebloger Mikail Lemberg wrote a post on his blog about Egypt as the Facebook’s most gay (Ægypterne er Facebooks mest homoseksuelle). As the post is in Danish I suggest that you use Google Translate - it provides a great English translation!

To sum up: Mikail states that

“Egypt is the country in the world with the largest proportion of declared gays and lesbians on Facebook.”

and

[...] “so I put myself in order to determine the proportion of declared homosexual members in Facebook 18 largest countries.”

and

“Nearly 10% of all Egyptian women tell of their profile info that they are “interested in women”.”

The problem here is (as suggested by the first submitted comment) that “Interested in women” or “Interested in men” profile option does not ask Facebook users about their sexual orientation. Interested in women could also mean interested in women as friends, new contacts … or maybe just implying that they would not like to be bothered by men (here all interpretations could be possible and it is certainly not as narrow as sexual orientation). If we look at statistics for all countries (not only top 18 as Mikail did) we can see that among Bolivia female Facebook users would be over 40%  lesbians.

It is also not likely that only 40% of all women in top three countries are heterosexual and little over 50% of men declare themselves as heterosexual.

As a personal project I also made a short research among my 10+ gay friends to see what they have written in “Interested in …” and almost 80% of them didn’t specify any option (interested in men or women). Only 20% of them stated interest that matches their sexual orientation.

Homework

To get interesting data try and search for

• males that are maried and interested in men
• females that are married and interested in women (131,960 in US)

Final word

If you would really like to select homosexual Facebook users you would at least need to take into consideration two parameters: Interested in men/women and Looking for (Dating and A relationship). But here you would get only homosexuals that are searching for dating or relationship.