#IamLGBT: Social networks and coming out

In recent decades, the number of people disclosing their LGBTQ identity has increased substantially. We use newly collected data from two waves of a spontaneous Twitter coming out campaign to study the role of peer effects in coming out. Importantly, we are able to distinguish actual public coming out decisions — costly, explicit disclosures — from mere engagement with the campaign. We combine data on users’ pre-campaign networks with the information on the exact time of coming out actions to construct a time-varying measure of the exposure to peers coming out as LGBTQ. A one standard deviation increase in the exposure increases the hourly probability of coming out by almost 20 percent. We also exploit the non-overlapping network structure of users’ peer groups as an exogenous source of variation, and we confirm the baseline results.