Yes, now you can show you're married to your same-sex partner on Facebook!
The new Facebook timeline is designed to "tell the story of your life" and so the designers at Facebook are constantly looking for ways to open up every possibility to their users.
This weekend the social network launched an update with new icons enabling users to show they are married to a person of the same sex. The two same-sex couple icons have joined the classic bride and groom one to make Facebook an even more gay-friendly place.
It's no surprise that this has come about, seeing as some of Facebook's employees are gay.
The network, which has close to one billion users, allowed same-sex couples to display their marital status on their timelines this weekend. The feature can be accessed, by those with the new Facebook timeline, by going to your profile, clicking 'Life Event' in the status area, then 'Family & Relationships', before selecting 'Marriage'.
Although same-sex marriage isn't available to everyone, everywhere, Facebook is making sure it's catering for LGBT people. This latest update joins a host of other Facebook features that are LGBT friendly, such as the ability to change your sex in the 'Info' section, or hide it completely. Facebook also has a very strict zero-tolerance policy when it comes to hate speech, as demonstrated through the Wipe Out Homophobia Facebook page. Set up by a Facebook user in May 2010, it rapidly gained 'likes' with over 1,000 members by the end of it's first day. Since then the community has managed to report and successfully remove hundreds of hateful pages.
But I guess this means it won't be long before we start seeing this around the place...
Facebook's pro-LGBT stance is nothing new. Its employees have spoken in support of LGBT equality and helped out with LGBT issues in the past, seeing as a decent proportion of their top-ranked workers are LGBT. Chris Kalani is openly gay and is part of the design team on Facebook. He designed some of the icons you see around the site and worked on the new timeline.
A group of employees recorded this It Gets Better video back in October 2010.
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