Countries with legal same-sex marriage

As countries around the world legalized same-sex marriage at an accelerating pace between 2013 and 2024, WeChat's monthly active user base grew from tens of millions to over a billion, correlating at r = 0.9666 in a finding that raises genuinely interesting questions about the nature of social progress and app monetization. It would be tempting to suggest that WeChat is somehow powering the global liberalization of marriage law, but Tencent's legal team would almost certainly disagree. The more likely explanation is that both phenomena belong to the 2010s, a decade that had opinions about a great many things simultaneously.

The number of countries with legal same-sex marriage grew from roughly 15 in 2013 to over 35 by 2024, as a wave of legislative and judicial decisions swept through Western Europe, the Americas, and parts of Asia and Africa. WeChat grew from approximately 300 million monthly active users in 2013 to over 1.3 billion by 2024, driven by smartphone penetration in China and diaspora adoption globally. Both are long-run trends with entirely separate drivers—progressive legal reform movements in one case, and platform network effects in a single-country-dominant app in the other—that share only the decade.

Social progress and platform growth are both real, both ongoing, and both entirely indifferent to each other's existence. Correlation across a decade of parallel change tells us the decade was eventful—nothing more.