Facebook, Twitter, Google Celebrate Same-Sex Marriage Decision

Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook

The Internet’s biggest companies celebrated Saturday after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a landmark ruling Friday making same-sex marriage legal in all 50 states.

Google, Facebook, and Twitter were just some of the social media networks adding rainbow-colored filters, pride videos, and hidden Easter eggs on their websites after Friday’s Supreme Court decision.

Google-owned YouTube debuted its #ProudToLove video celebrating the decision and June’s LGBT Pride Month. The video features a montage of LGBT community members and celebrities like Ellen Page and Ellen DeGeneres coming out over the video-sharing site:

“Over the last 10 years, everyone from moms to presidents have uploaded videos in support of LGBT awareness, to stand up against bullying and discrimination, and to say together, as a community, that marriage equality matters,” the company said in a statement captioning the video.

“That’s why we are so excited by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to recognize the constitutional right of all couples to marry. In recognition of Pride Month, and of this historic decision, we want to celebrate the many individuals and communities that have helped inspire change.”

Google’s traditional search website also got into the celebration. Searching for words that pertained to the ruling, like “gay” or “marriage equality” turns up a rainbow-colored heart in place of the Google logo in the top left corner and a row of rainbow-colored stick figures holding hands across the top of the page.

Meanwhile, Facebook users were treated Saturday to the option to “celebrate pride” by adding a rainbow-colored filter to their profile pictures.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg added the rainbow filter to his own profile picture and released a statement in a post.

“I’m so happy for all of my friends and everyone in our community who can finally celebrate their love and be recognized as equal couples under the law,” Zuckerberg wrote. “We still have much more to do to achieve full equality for everyone in our community, but we are moving in the right direction.”

The company also released a video called “Pride Connects Us” on its Facebook Stories platform. The video tells the story of Justin Kamimoto, who founded several LGBT support groups in California’s more conservative Central Valley. The video cites a statistic that 6 million people identify as LGBT on Facebook.

Twitter added its own celebratory tweaks after President Obama used the hashtag #LoveWins in announcing the ruling. For each subsequent tweet that used that hashtag, Twitter added a little rainbow heart at the end of the tweet. Using the hashtag #Pride added a rainbow-colored flag to the end of a tweet:

There were 6.2 million tweets about the ruling in just four hours after it was announced, an average of 20,000 tweets a minute, according to USA Today. Facebook announced that 3.8 million people in the United States had 10.1 million interactions on the site within just an hour of the ruling coming down.

Other social media networks celebrated too; messaging service Snapchat added their own rainbow-colored filters for users to place over their posts with the caption, “Making History,” and added a “Marriage Equality” snap story to its popular platform, while taxi app Uber displayed rainbow trails on each of the cars in a user’s vicinity:

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