Identify Gays via Facebook Friends

Homosexual men can be identified just by looking at their Facebook friends, according to unpublished research by two students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

As part of the study the researchers Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree scanned the Facebook friends of more than 1,500 fellow students who indicated their sexual orientation – straight, gay or bisexual – on their profiles.

This analysis revealed that homosexual men had proportionally more gay friends than straight men, allowing the students to devise a computer programme to predict the sexual orientation of other Facebook users based solely on the sexualities of their friends.

In total the researchers ran their software on 947 people who did not disclose their sexual orientation on their profiles, but it failed to accurately identify lesbians or bisexuals of either gender.