“I imagined I’d raise the alarm,” Dr. Kosinski said in an interview. “Now I’m paying the price.” He’d just had a meeting with campus police “because of the number of death threats.”

Advocacy groups like Glaad and the Human Rights Campaign denounced the study as “junk science” that “threatens the safety and privacy of LGBTQ and non-LGBTQ people alike.”

The authors have “invented the algorithmic equivalent of a 13-year-old bully,” wrote Greggor Mattson, the director of the Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies Program at Oberlin College. He was one of dozens of academics, scientists and others who picked apart the study in blog posts and Tweet storms.