MIT’s Facebook ‘Gaydar’ project

Does experimental software designed to 'out' gay Facebook users reveal a fatal flaw in social networking?

Project Gaydar “started as a simple term project for an MIT class on ethics and law on the electronic frontier,” said Carolyn Y. Johnson in The Boston Globe. It’s turned into a way to “out” people on Facebook, thanks to a “striking discovery” by students Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree: Gay people have larger numbers of gay Facebook “friends.” They turned that insight into “Gaydar,” a program that predicts a Facebook user’s sexual orientation.

That might be really useful, said Ryan Tate in Gawker’s Valleywag, if you’re “quietly stalking someone and too dense to figure out their sexual orientation from Google searches, Flickr party photos, and real-life gossip.” For the rest of us, Gaydar seems a bit superfluous. Has there ever been a group less likely to hide their sexuality than the “young oversharers on Facebook and Twitter”?

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