As the same-sex marriage debate intensifies, Facebook has joined forces with Australian Marriage Equality to support the cause.
The social media giant’s 14 million Australian users can now add an equality banner to their profile pictures.
Last year, Facebook helped 26 million users worldwide celebrate the legalisation of same-sex marriage in the US and Ireland with a rainbow filter designed but this campaign marks the first time it has offered up its “frame” feature for a political or social cause.
Facebook director of policy for Australia, Mia Garlick, said marriage equality was “one of the most talked-about topics on Facebook”.
She said the frame feature was “a way of us amplifying the conversations that we already see happening on the platform”.
AME campaign director Erin McCallum said the new feature was a “simple, yet powerful way for individuals and businesses to show what we already know”.
The move comes amid an increasingly heated public debate about same-sex marriage.
On Monday, leaked pamphlets obtained by Fairfax Media claimed that children from same-sex families area more prone to “abuse and neglect” and likely to become unemployed, abuse drugs and suffer from depression.
The pamphlets, funded by former Liberal MP Chris Miles, also claimed that “married biological parents have a better record for providing safety and development of healthy, well adjusted adult children”.
Mr Miles said that if a plebiscite was going to happen “people needed to be informed”.
And on Monday’s ABC’s Q & A, right-wing lobbyist Lyle Shelton likened same-sex surrogacy to the Stolen Generation.
Mr Shelton, managing director of Australian Christian Lobby, said changing the definition of marriage to include same-sex couples would break the “primal bond between a mother and her baby”.
“We did take Indigenous children and babies from their mothers and give them to loving families but the error we apologised for was for taking them from their biological mother and father,” he said.
“Through assisted reproductive technology, we are taking the child from their biological father or their mother and giving them to someone else.”
His claims were rejected out of hand by Dr Kerryn Phelps, the first woman and LGBT person elected head of the Australian Medical Association.
You can click on anybody’s profile that has just UPDATED THEIR PROFILE PIC to change your profile or you can find details of how to install your rainbow banner at Campaign Brief.
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