Short answer: Not actually that gay.

Long answer: Read on.

Facebook only allows you to view the past 7 days, so here’s the Google Trends graph for “swine flu” as a search term to keep in mind while looking at the data; the red line is where data collection begins:

How I did this gaynalysis

Using facebook’s friend filter, I classified all of my friends into one of three friend lists: Gay, Straight Dude, or Straight Bitty. The “Gay” category includes anyone who I know identifies as any letter of the LGBTQQI2S alphabet soup for convenience’s sake.

Friend breakdown is thus:

I then expanded my newsfeed to its maximum, which is seven days, and counted each the total entries and entries that mention swine flu in some form for each friend list.

In the past 7 days, there have been 59 items in my newsfeed mentioning swine flu, out of 1999 total items. Sixteen mentions were by gay people, 23 by straight dudes, and 20 by straight bitties.

Relative Likelihood of Talking about Swine Flu

Here is the data on the relative likelihood of mentioning swine flu on Facebook.  

The Gayness Ratio is simply a measure of comparative over- or underrepresentation, and is the ratio of the (percentage of swine flu mentions) to (percent of that population).  Looking at the raw data, gay people were 2.5 times more likely to mention swine flu than the average – 27% of swine flu mentions were by gay people, while only 10.9% of my Facebook friends are gay. However, I have previously shown that gay people use Facebook more than straight people – 50% more gay people have updated their status in the past 24 hours, and we update it 2.25 times more than would be expected.

The “adjusted” figures in the above graph somewhat take this into account.

As an approximation, I used the previously calculated Gayness Ratio of status updates to adjust the raw data to correct for the fact that gay people are more likely to mention anything on Facebook due to their overuse of it. I chose status updates since the majority of swine flu mentions were via status updates. I divided the raw Gayness Ratios of mentioning swine flu by the status update Gayness Ratio, resulting in a less impressive difference – gay people were only 11% more likely than straight people to mention swine flu in relation to how damn much we use Facebook.

The above graphs further break the data down to compare the relative likelihood of mentioning swine flu of gays to straight dudes and bitties.

Each graph excludes either straight dudes or straight bitties, respectively.

Gays were 2.26 times more likely to mention swine flu than straight men and 4 times more likely to mention it than straight women.  (The Gayness Ratio is in comparison to the average, so divide them to get relative likelihood.) However, I couldn’t adjust this data because the previous gaynalysis did not break down by gender.

The above graph provides the best visualization of swine flu mentions by describing the percentages of newsfeed items that contain references to swine flu.  Because of differences in Facebook utilization, just discrete mentions of swine flu are misleading.  Over the past 7 days, 3% of all of my newsfeed items mentioned swine flu.  In comparison, 3% of gay newsfeed items mentioned swine flu, 4.5% of straight dude newsfeed items mentioned swine flu, and 2% of straight bitty items mentioned swine flu. 

Conclusion

Straight dudes care about swine flu 50% more than gays do and 214% more than bitties do – it’s just that bitties and gays don’t shut up on facebook, so it seems like gays love swine flu more than anyone else.