I Took 100 Facebook Screenshots - Here's What I Found!

While scrolling through Facebook one night, I found my algorithm was feeding me a lot of pride related content. It makes sense! I’ve been interacting with it a lot recently, not only since it is pride month, but also with all of the devastating things happening globally and in third world countries such as the USA, these upsetting updates have been coming to my attention more and more.

And something else that has caught my eye has been the reactions on any LGBTQ+ related posts.

Facebook typically previews two or three out of their seven reactions, meaning you can gauge at a glance what people are thinking. If they’re happy, if they’re sad, if they found something funny or if they’re mad – you generally know. But unfortunately expect to find some angry comments under any pride post you come across, because it’s 2025 and the world is still unfortunately full of bigotry.

A prime example of hate sprinkled amidst positive works of art.

Looking at a post, curiosity piqued my interest and I clicked into the breakdown of reactions. It showed a couple thousand like and love reactions, a handful of care reactions and only some stray laughing or angry faces in comparison to all of the support that was being shown. Looking at the comments, the bigotry was front and centre, as usual.

I scrolled some more and had a look at the next pride-related post that came across my feed, finding some similar results.

Seeing a trend among these statistics, I thought it would be interesting to gather a decent sample and write down all of the numbers to see which reactions are ruling the roost. And so, I did just that.

I scrolled. And screenshotted. And scrolled. And screenshotted. And scrolled… You get the idea.

I didn’t follow any particular guide, as long as it was a generally positive or informative post. I took screenshots from official news channels and from queer friendly Facebook pages big and small!

So, among this cluster of hearts and laugh reacts, we have a bit of everything! To give you an idea, here are just a handful of some of the topics I screenshotted, with varying degrees of anger to all of them:

• Yungblud announced their pronouns are they/them.

• Drawings of mystical creatures (unicorns, dragons, etc.) in pride flag colours.

• The original screen-used ghostbusters vehicle appearing in the LA pride parade.

• Gospel Drag Show celebrating pride and supporting the Food Ministry.

• Cole Escola wins an acting tony Award as first out nonbinary person in history.

• The official WICKED The Musical account wishing everyone a happy pride month.

• Puerto Rico’s Supreme Court ruling that birth certificates must allow an ‘X’ gender marker.

• Imagine Dragons lead singer, Dan Reynolds, proudly displaying pride flags at numerous shows.

• A post about Star Trek always being ‘woke’ and accepting of transgender identities.

• A video of Adele telling off a heckler for saying pride sucks.

• Posts from important organisations such as The Trevor Project and Minus18.

• Pride flags and pride parades.

And much more.

A sample of 10 of the Facebook screenshots I took.

After taking 100 screenshots of various Facebook posts, I made a spreadsheet and began writing down the numbers.

Unfortunately, due to the limitations of Facebook, I had to give a very standalone estimate on a large number of reactions. When a post had 2.5k likes or 1k laugh reacts, it wouldn’t allow me to see the exact number of reactions. True to the post at the time, it may have had 2573 likes or 1982 laugh reacts – we will never know without counting them out one by one and I am not devoting my time to that, especially since, those specific numbers will not make a significant difference.

By the 25th sample I was inputting, I was laughing. I was laughing at how pitiful the negative reactions were against the swells of love toward LGBTQ+ content. And it was very clear that I could have gone out of my way to count every single laugh react, sad face or angry scowl and it wouldn’t even make a dent in the positive reactions.

I put together a handful of graphs to show the superior swing that love and community has over hate.

I think this graph in particular speaks volumes. Love will always win over hate, even if hate seems louder.

Across 100 Facebook posts, I counted…

561,594 like reactions – that’s half a million, mind you!

324,168 love reactions.

20,461 care reactions.

23,368 haha reactions.

626 wow reactions.

936 sad reactions.

3,461 angry reactions.

Across 100 Facebook posts, that is a grand total of 934,614 reactions!

But I wanted to explore this further.

I calculated the reactions of the 5 posts with the most reactions and the 5 posts with the least reactions. And regardless of how many people reacted to it, positivity conquered over the bigotry, even if it didn’t seem like it in the comments.

There are more care reactions in the top 5 most popular posts than there are angry reactions across 100 Facebook posts.

Bigotry, in particular towards LGBTQ+ communities, often ends up as an echo chamber online. The algorithm feeds you what you interact with – even if you interact negatively with it. Views are views, reactions are reactions – Facebook doesn’t care whether you want to hear about it or not.

The more the bigots hate it, the more they react negatively, the more they comment horrible things, the more they feel like ‘the gays are shoving it down their throats’. When in reality, they’re spoon-feeding themselves.

They congregate in the comments and bicker and sneer angrily. The comment section becomes an arena of arguing and religion is often (falsely) pushed in favour of condemning queer identities. They get louder and louder, and the algorithm which thrives off of the chaos and the hurt pushes it above the lone comment below that says ‘Hey, this resource really helped me!’ or ‘Coming out made me feel normal!”

It's hard to display a same like this when there is a clear swing favouring LGBTQ+ pride, equity and basic human decency.

Welcome to Facebook. It’s a cesspool of discriminatory comments and an echo chamber of conservatives believing they are rightfully judge, jury and executioner.

But they’re not.

This is only 100 posts. There are no doubt millions upon millions of posts on Facebook alone, without factoring other social media apps like Instagram, Threads, etc. But these graphs alone show that there are at least half a million people that care.

Half a million people – and so many more – like the positive news, they love seeing queer families thrive, they care about the LGBTQ community because they are apart of it or have someone who is.

The comments make me frustrated, and when I am in a poor headspace, I take care not to look. But I know that when I am next feeling frustrated with the world, I will definitely look at these graphs, because they show that people do care.

I hope you have had a safe and happy pride month. June has been… A lot. There has been a constant whirlwind of global unease, and the good moments often get pushed beneath the waves to make light of all of the negativity in the world. Unfortunately, the negativity and the outrage it brings sells more than sunshine and rainbows, but that doesn’t mean it’s all the world is.

The world is everchanging and fighting for good, even if it doesn’t feel like it. One step, one breath, one blog at a time – we will make it.

Thank you for reading,

Kimberley (they/them)

Accessories by Antoinette