Singular They And Social Networking: Google Plus

July 19th, 2011
facebook, googleplus, ling, they
While facebook no longer lets you use ungendered pronouns, google plus does support them:
If you decide to make your gender private on Google+, we'll to use gender-neutral language to describe you whenever someone else encounters gender-related information about you but doesn't have permission to see your gender. For example, instead of saying 'Greg added you to his circles' or 'Frances added you to her circles', we'll say 'Greg added you to their circles' or 'Frances added you to their circles'. Yes, I know this is grammatically questionable. You don't need to message me about it. We value helping people control their privacy as being much more important than being grammatically perfectly. -- Frances Haugen, Google Plus Project Manager
Now that I think about it, I believe I've seen facebook using singular they with a named antecedent ("john smith changed their profile picture") more recently than 2008, but I can't find any examples looking through my newsfeed.

Update 2011-07-19: Mog says facebook doesn't know their gender and they have "Margaret changed their profile picture" on their facebook profile from early may. Not so hard to rephrase: "Margret [has|chose|picked|got] a new profile picture".

Referenced in:

Comment via: google plus, facebook, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

The One That I Want Another Sister

I want a baby sister or brother. Because I want to play with another kid, and I don't want to play with Josie because she is in preschool and I won't play with her very often. So I want to play with someone very often who is not just two people. …

via Nora Wise's Blog Posts September 5, 2026

Linkpost for September

On September 19 and 20, Sparrow Infrastructure is putting on The Overhang, a conference in Washington D.C.

via Thing of Things September 4, 2026

Ed Zitron's AI prediction track record

I was curious how well the predictions of the most widely cited AI skeptic I've seen (Ed Zitron) have done, so I looked at how his predictions panned out. To disclose my own biases, I've never had a particularly strong pro or anti AI progress posi…

via Posts on September 1, 2026

more     (via openring)