AKA William

In a yet-to-be published study, two MIT students, Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree, were able to put some math behind the intuition that you can tell who’s gay by knowing who that person’s friends are:

Using data from the social network Facebook, they made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person’s online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. They did this with a software program that looked at the gender and sexuality of a person’s friends and, using statistical analysis, made a prediction.

. . . “When they first did it, it was absolutely striking – we said, ‘Oh my God – you can actually put some computation behind that,’ ” said Hal Abelson, a computer science professor at MIT who co-taught the course. “That pulls the rug out from a whole policy and technology perspective that the point is to give you control over your information – because you don’t have control over your information.”

The predictions worked best for gay men. And while this might not be groundbreaking news — I mean, how many times have you checked out a high school friend’s friends, saw that a bunch of them were gay, and thought, “I bet he’s gay?” — it does mean that it’s possible to tease out patterns of behavior based on social media profiles, even when that behavior is, ostensibly, hidden.