Facebook sprouting rainbows
New photo filter app latest sign of a shifting tide
NEW YORK – You may have noticed your Facebook friends getting considerably more colorful.
More than 26 million Facebook profile photos have taken on a rainbow hue in the days since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled June 26 that marriage is a right guaranteed under the Constitution regardless of a person’s sexual orientation.
People have been covering their profile photos with the Facebook-supplied overlay that uses the best-known symbol of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights movement: the rainbow.
Call it armchair activism. Call it a mark of a shifting tide in public opinion. The rainbows are the latest sign of the important place social media has taken in our lives, from self-expression to politics and privacy.
Rainbow-tinted celebrities have popped up all around, and not just Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Leonardo DiCaprio and “Fifty Shades of Grey” author E.L. James are among those who have used the filter.
While the people who’ve used the overlay are a fraction of Facebook’s 1.4 billion users worldwide, the number is far bigger than the last mass profile photo change on the site. In 2013, some 3 million Facebook users changed their photos to show a pink-on-red equal sign in support of gay marriage. Four years earlier, in what might have been the first large-scale profile-photo activism, Twitter users turned their photo green to support pro-democracy protesters in Iran.
Not long after the rainbows appeared last week, so did questions about whether Facebook was tracking people who changed their photos and what it was going to do with the information.
“We haven’t experimented with anything, and other than counting how people used it, we aren’t using the data for anything else,” wrote Alex Schultz, a vice president at Facebook, in a post.
Facebook also said it is not using the filters for ad targeting nor does it plan to do so.
Since then, others also have turned to rainbow as well. Ride-hailing app Uber, for example, added tiny rainbows to the cars on its map. And on Wednesday, Beyonce posted a video of herself dancing in various rainbow-colored outfits with the hashtag “lovewins.”