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Facebook Leads To Increase In STDs in Britain

ectotherm writes "According to Professor Peter Kelly, a director of Public Health in Great Britain: 'There has been a four-fold increase in the number of syphilis cases detected, with more young women being affected.' Why the increase? People meeting up for casual sex through Facebook. According to the article, 'Social networking sites are making it easier for people to meet up for casual sex. There is a rise in syphilis because people are having more sexual partners than 20 years ago and often do not use condoms.'"

9 of 270 comments (clear)

  1. C!=C by Sta7ic · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Correlation is not causation. Facebook usage may correlate, but doesn't cause it.

    "Don't drink and park. Accidents make people."

    1. Re:C!=C by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Correlation is not causation. Facebook usage may correlate, but doesn't cause it.

      "Don't drink and park. Accidents make people."

      I'd love to see your data disproving causation in this scenario. Or are you just making a blind guess?

      Just because "facebook usage may coorelate" you cannot take the logical leap and say that it "doesn't cause it"

      Correlation is often a good grounds for doing a study to determine causation/non-causation.

      People who don't understand what "correlation != causation" is supposed to convey should avoid using it.

  2. Really? by cbope · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Wow, that's about as enlightening as saying bars and nightclubs lead to more casual sex. People socializing more, and it leads to sex? No shit. Doesn't really matter how the contact is made, does it?

  3. Um... by Pojut · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...I wouldn't say this is a problem with Facebook so much as a problem with fucking stupidity. It's not my place to question someone's sexual activity, but come on...who has sex with a stranger without using a condom?

    1. Re:Um... by char70ger · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Why would you want to have sex with a "stranger" even if you did have a condom?

    2. Re:Um... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Because it's fun? And they are less of a stranger afterwards.

  4. ..as reported by Murdoch's newspapers by RMH101 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...as they pointedly do NOT mention MySpace. Hmm. Wonder why that could be, NewsCorp?

  5. Re:Really? by nelsonal · · Score: 4, Insightful

    How bout, facebook makes it easy for women to filter and select the few men they all want to sleep with, so those men sleep with huge numbers of women (and disease spreads rampantly).

    --
    Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
  6. Re:Wrong places by Grishnakh · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It sounds like the answer here is to join Facebook, but use an alias instead of your real name. That way, the people from your past can't find you, and if you need to disappear because one of your new hook-ups turns out to be a psycho, then it'll be easier since you can just create a new alias and start over.

    But honestly, this Facebook hookup thing sounds like a lot of work, alias or no. Wouldn't it be easier to just join AdultFriendFinder for casual sex? Probably not; it seems like women want to believe that men they meet might actually be interested in something long-term, even though it's plainly obvious that they're not, so they need men who tell them all kinds of lies, like "my wife are I are married in name only", "we're separated but staying together just for the kids", etc. Then they act all surprised, like Tiger's girlfriends, when they find out that he's been lying to them.

    Women, is it really so hard to just be honest? If you want casual sex, stop making men jump through hoops and make up lies for it. If you want a long-term relationship, then find a man who's actually single (not one who's married and supposedly "separated"), and keep your legs shut until you actually know him well enough to know he's the one you want to have kids with, or at least know him well enough to know he's not a psycho or a liar.