Digital Traces of Sexualities: Understanding the Salience of Sexual Identity through Disclosure on Social Media

Abstract

The authors analyze the expression of sexualities in the contemporary United States using data about disclosure on social media. Through the Facebook advertising platform, the authors collect aggregate counts encompassing 200 million Facebook users, 28 percent of whom disclose sexuality-related information. Stratifying by age, gender, and relationship status, the authors show how these attributes structure the propensity to disclose different sexual identities. There is a large generational difference; younger social media users share their sexualities at high rates, while for older cohorts marital status substitutes for sexual identity. Consistent with gendered expectations, women more often express a bisexual interest in men and women; men are more explicit about their heterosexuality. The authors interpret these variations in sexuality disclosure on social media to reflect the salience of sexual identity, intersected at times with availability. This study contributes to the sociology of sexuality with a quantitative analysis, using novel digital data, of how sexuality is signaled socially.

“Hey, by the Way, I’m Transgender”: Transgender Disclosures as Coming Out Stories in Social Contexts among Trans Men

“…Finally, although this article analyzes trans men’s gender disclosures as one form of identity management, scholarship has highlighted that everyone practices forms of impression or identity management to showcase idealized images of themselves in interaction (Goffman 1959, 1963). For instance, empirical scholarship has analyzed how those with biracial identities (Khanna and Johnson 2010; Sims 2016), socioeconomic status (Streib 2015), sobriety (Herman-Kinney and Kinney 2013), sexual identities on social media (Gilroy and Kashyap 2021), undocumented immigrant youth, fat acceptance activists, Mormon fundamentalist polygamists, sexual harassment lawyers and activists (Saguy 2020), or those who previously experienced an abortion (Cockrill and Nack 2013) have practiced identity management through disclosure. Thus, my research on disclosures from trans men is applicable to a wider scale of people who practice impression or identity management.…”

Born digital or fossilised digitally? How born digital data systems continue the legacy of social violence towards LGBTQI + communities: a case study of experiences in the Republic of Ireland

“…Gender classification in digital data systems is also evident in the social media data made available from social networking platforms, such as Facebook, to advertising companies and researchers (Gilroy and Kashyap 2021 ). Social media technology companies collect data created by the end-users of their social networking sites within virtual communities and networks (Kaplan and Haenlein 2010 ).…”

“…Social media technology companies collect data created by the end-users of their social networking sites within virtual communities and networks (Kaplan and Haenlein 2010 ). It is the social media technology companies, such as Facebook, who make the decisions on how to collect the data and how to make this data available (Bivens 2017 ; Gilroy and Kashyap 2021 ). This inferred information about us and our behaviour is then used as a reliable data source by advertising companies and coded as relationships between people, ideas and things into algorithms to predict what people like and want (Van Dijck 2013 ).…”

“…Furthermore “in the deep level of the database, non-binary users are reconfigured into a binary system.” (Bivens 2017 ). Facebook’s act of forcing the diversity of gender identities binary categories was intrinsic to the limitations of a recent quantitative analysis of digital data from Facebook’s advertising platform to show how sexuality is indicated socially (Gilroy and Kashyap 2021 ). The extent of these limitations where that it was not possible to differentiate between transgender and cisgender women and men nor was it possible to include non-binary people in the study and therefore this study was limited to a binary understanding of gender (Gilroy and Kashyap 2021 ) highlighting the marginalisation of genders outside of the heteronormative female/woman and male/man.…”

“…Facebook’s act of forcing the diversity of gender identities binary categories was intrinsic to the limitations of a recent quantitative analysis of digital data from Facebook’s advertising platform to show how sexuality is indicated socially (Gilroy and Kashyap 2021 ). The extent of these limitations where that it was not possible to differentiate between transgender and cisgender women and men nor was it possible to include non-binary people in the study and therefore this study was limited to a binary understanding of gender (Gilroy and Kashyap 2021 ) highlighting the marginalisation of genders outside of the heteronormative female/woman and male/man. Further to this, due to the intersectionality of gender and sexual orientation, Facebook’s data categorisation limited the ability of Gilroy and Kashyap’s ( 2021 ) research to account for the full spectrum of sexual identities and made sexualities, such as asexual, invisible.…”