Anyone who has been on Facebook in the past two days has seen the LGTB activist group Human Rights Campaign’s red equal sign symbol. This symbol is meant to promote equality for marriage and to represent the idea that love is love whether gay, straight, bisexual or otherwise. This image flooded my news feed, and I realized that this is both an incredible form of rhetoric as well as a form of media bias.
The idea of this social media movement was to have anyone in support of gay marriage put this red equal sign up as their profile picture for two days while the Supreme Court discussed the issue. This movement started Tuesday and the red equal signs seemed to be the only thing on my news feed. George Takei, Mr. Sulu from Star Trek, who has boldly gone where few men have gone before by marrying his husband, encouraged the almost 4 million fans of his Facebook page to join this ‘enterprise.’
The true brilliance of this use of social media comes from the timing. Very few people change their profile pictures on a regular basis, and not many post on Facebook on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Because of these two factors, even though only ten or twelve of my friends changed their picture, it looked like everyone did, because the news feed favors showing profile picture changes. This made support for gay marriage appear much more widespread than the 53% of Americans supporting it in a recent Gallup poll.
This is a good example of sample bias that had a huge social media effect. I was very impressed with the success of this movement and I think that the social media is a very powerful place to advocate for a cause. This movement shows that the social media, plus good timing, can greatly affect the general public. Celebrity support and widespread participation on Facebook led to numerous stories about the movement online and on television, which increased the impact of the movement.
