Facebook Data Science Team

How The Equality Symbol Spread Through Facebook

HRCRedEqualSign

On March 26, several people all over Facebook changed their profile photos to red and light-shaded equality signs in support of the Human Rights Campaign and same-sex marriage. While Facebook couldn’t track specifically the numbers of those who changed their profile pictures to this image, the site’s data science team tracked how many users changed their profile photos that day — an increase of 120 percent.

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Facebook: A Family Affair

FamilyPortrait

If your children are in their early to mid-20s, don’t hold your breath waiting for Facebook friend requests from them. That was just one nugget of information from the Facebook Data Science Team, which analyzed posts on the social network that were anonymized and processed automatically by users who identified themselves as parents or children to get a better sense of how families interact with each other on Facebook.

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