Slashdot Mirror
Facebook a Factor in a Third of UK Divorces
hypnosec writes with an excerpt from an IT Pro Portal article: "A recent survey conducted by a UK based divorce website disclosed that 33 percent of behavior divorce petitions filed cite Facebook as a cause for filing for divorce in 2011. In 2009 this figure was 20 per cent. 5000 people were surveyed by Divorce-Online, the UK divorce website, during 2009 and 2011 covering Facebook as a means to check behavior of spouse with the opposite sex and spouses using the social networking platform to comment about their exes post the separation. Three reasons that came out on the top for listing Facebook in divorce petition were inappropriate messages sent to the opposite sex, posting nasty comments about exes, and friends on Facebook reporting about spouse's behavior."
Welcome, ladies and gentlemen! How many times can the same story be recycled over the course of two years?
December 22, 2009 - Facebook's Other Top Trend of 2009: Divorce
April 12, 2010 - Facebook to Blame for Divorce Boom
June 28, 2010 - Facebook is divorce lawyers' new best friend
January 19, 2011 - Divorce cases get the Facebook factor
March 7, 2011 - Survey Shows Facebook an Increasing Factor in Divorce
January 1, 2012 - Facebook flirting triggers divorces
Slow news cycle? Nothing else to publish? Blame Facebook for divorce!
"Sufferin' succotash."
Wow, this is some poor reporting. At first I thought the summary was to blame, but no, the articles themselves have it wrong. Facebook is being cited in 33% of all British divorces, but not as the cause. When they say cited, they mean just that: That something from Facebook was brought up in the courtroom. That could be, and in fact seems to frequently be something from well after the couple has separated, brought up as part of custody or property hearings.
ANYTHING you let get online is known by everyone. forever.
Including all those things you don't want some people to find out about.
People flirt in the real world, too. And talk to the opposite sex. And do everything you'd assume a human does.
Facebook has provided a way to record human behavior -- and that is, apparently, annoying to people.
Its not that surprising. Human behavior hasn't really changed over the years however the information age has made it harder to hide affairs. 30 years ago an affair 1000 miles away while on a business trip would be incredibly easy to hide. Today? Not so much. We've gone from spouses spending little time in contact to constant 24/7 contact so it is no wonder that their spouse's flaws come to light. No longer is work an 8-9 hour void for 5 days a week with no contact to their spouse. No longer do long trips pose a problem thanks to cell phones.
The more we are in contact with each other the more evident flaws are.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Shit, I'd better get into that first!
http://www.gibby.net.au
it must have been much more difficult to dig dirt when people wanted to divorce without saying they wanted out :)
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
Guess not...
Claiming that Facebook caused your divorce is like claiming the telephone caused your divorce when you heard your wife using it to cheat on you. People need to take more time to fully understand the communications medium they have chosen. Not that it's particularly easy with a closed, privately held system such as Facebook.
Social sites such as bars cited as responsible for 33% of divorces,
The top 3 reasons cited:
Inappropriate comments to members of the opposite sex;
Separated spouses saying nasty comments about each other;
Friends reporting spouse’s behaviour.
More news @ 11, or make that 12, the year, 2012, when NOTHING HAS CHANGED!
-AI
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
If my chances of divorce are higher having Facebook, count me in.
The surest way to get internet cenrered answers is to have online data capturing.
Just the usual meme, "People behave like dicks!" Except, word gets back faster. I don't see FB being a "cause" for any divorces: it's just the messenger.
Maybe it's because I've been online for about 20 years now and I've learned my lesson, but I never got into the whole social networking thing. The notion of posting every triviality in my life on the web without regard for the privacy or embarrassment of myself or my friends boggles the mind.
My theory is that as reality TV has become so mainstream and so many famous-for-being-famous celebs have found wealth regardless of their lack of talent and charisma, lots of regular folk are clamoring for their 15 minutes of fame that could make them the next millionaire Snookie. I created a Facebook page just for people to find me and I purposely don't stay logged in. I was embarrassed to see the rants, self-pitying pleas, flaunting, and exhibitions posted by people I barely knew. I guess like any other new technology, it'll take time for people to learn how to manage it in their lives.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
For me, that is like saying, the automobile is responsible for 70% of divorces because it enables a spouse to drive to the house of their lover.
PEOPLE are responsible for infidelity, not their tools.
Seriously honey, it was just a one-time fling, Facebook means nothing to me...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Didn't we get rid of the 'cause' for divorce thing, and now the only cause for divorce is wanting one?
Saying that it is 'wrong' to sleep with someone else and that it should therefore cost everything the 'cheater' has is such a backwards idea.
I guess the UK still lives in the past.
Sexual conduct should have nothing to do with a marriage contract.
If it wasn't Facebook it would be something else. People who are getting divorced will generally get divorced anyway. I think part of the problem is a lot of people don't consider marriage "permanent" anymore so divorce becomes a bit like breaking up. The other problem is people marrying someone they haven't tried living with yet and then finding their unbearable after. I lived with my girlfriend for 5 years before marrying her. But the idea that someone would've been married for 50 years if social networking sites like facebook didn't exist is ludicrous.
Facebook is not a *reason* why people divorce and I bet it was not even a *factor* either. It is just an excuse trumped up when a lot of small things and big things led to the divorce. Infidelity, and love stopping between the couple is the reason (hormone level dropping after 5 years in the brain of the love bird would be a factor). Once that stage is reached and couple fill for divorce, they will use any reason. From favorizing the dog, to using facebook, to drinking with buddeee, to anything, as long as in their mind it "justify" it. Heck some spouse even trump up a pedophilia card in a bid to get sole guardian of the children.
are total twats if they reveal stuff about their personal lives that can be 'used in court as evidence against them'.
The same goes for SMS messages not deleted from their phones.
Ditto for Twatter.
etc
etc
etc
Sadly these idiots are so hooked on the fact there are other sad people out there willing to read the drivel they spout about their boring lives that they can't stop themselves.
Just this morning, one twenty something who was sitting next to me on the train into Waterloo spent the whole 55mins updating her FB pages with useless crap about what she did yesterday. Right down to what mascara she wore.
Her 17in laptop sitting on her lap with the brightness turned up full was pretty impossible to ignore.
What do you expect when you, your friends and their friends all document there activity online to be looked at ?
I mean come on.
I little defective work and friending someone in the know, will bring you undone.
It only a matter of time until the young fools are so addicted to Facebook. It will be crawled by law and they are in trouble with the law without cops leaving there desk.
Not a word.
Self-selected from among the visitors to the Divorce-Online site?
Without some info about methodology, there's no reason to treat this report as anything but self-promotion.
There are cases like mine where my FaceBook is never logged off and my wife can read it any time she wants. The reason is, there's nothing to hide. I've classically been "The Safe Guy" on FaceBook and at the office and elsewhere. Women will hang around me and even flirt a bit with me because they know that not only do I enjoy the attention, but that there's just no way that I'm going to be a risk to them. I'm also the guy who will bring them safely home at the end of the night if they drink to much.
:)
You make the presumption that it's an issue that it's easier for people to get caught. And yet, men acting inappropriately or stupidly probably only accounts for about half of the cases. Some guy adding his ex from high school or someone else that his wife is jealous of (and it works reversing the genders as well) probably accounts for a lot also. People are extremely insecure at times. All my ex-girlfriends which didn't turn out to be nut jobs (and even one or two that did) are on my friends list. I also have the captain of the high school cheer leading team and others which my wife could easily get jealous of if she didn't understand me well enough to know that friends are friends... wife is wife. You do some things with friends, you do some more things with wife
Now, there's another big reason for it. Women or men who got married too quickly, found out that they screwed up... maybe getting married too young, got married for the money, got married just to throw a wedding (watch TLC sometime, Bridezilla, Left at the Alter, etc...) and once the dream wedding was over, there was no point to the marriage. All kinds of reasons people get married when they really shouldn't have and then FaceBook is a great way to come up with "evidence" against their spouse so they can get out of it without getting too burned.
So, FaceBook is probably just something that magnifies problems for some people. Jealous and insecure people were able to lie to themselves beforehand and pretend like it's just their imagination and now they got some confirmation it wasn't. Guys who act like assholes behind their wive's backs get talked about. People who were looking for a way out to begin with can find things more easily. In short, Facebook is really nothing more than a tool.
Now, for the real solution to this problem.
DON'T GET MARRIED. Marriage is a religious commitment between two people before an audience and some god of some type. In most religions, it's expected to be for life. If you and your girl are two people who are the types to not "stick together through thick and thin" then getting married in the first place is a lie. In modern times where a woman is able to put food on her own table, buy her own cloths and if necessary put a roof over her own head, there's absolutely no good reason for marriage other than religious belief. If you have kids together and are worried about the issue of custody if one of the parent die, there are civil unions and contractual agreements for that. You don't have to get legally married to have a wedding party. You don't have to get legally married to get some guy in a funny costume or hat ask you if you love each other. Legal marriage is an institution which says "I'll make a promise to this lady because I love her and I don't want her to ever worry about where her next meal is coming from. I legally take the responsibility of this woman and promise that since she is incapable of taking care of herself if need be, this will take care of that." and to a woman it says "I'm too weak to care for myself and I need some legal protection that makes it so he can't just run off to be with someone else without some form of legal and financial repercussion. So even if he does ditch me for someone who's willing to do things I'm not, he'll owe me for life". Civil union allows all the things like "If the decision comes whether to take me off of life support, I want this person to choose", but so does a living will.
Just remember, marriage is designed to protect the weaker gender. Oh... marriage is also the core of the entire divorce attorney business.
Did the total number of divorces go up? The TFA doesn't mention that.
So probably people are using facebook as an excuse where they used other excuses in the years before.
Privacy is terrorism.
Online petition means you don't get the >45 age-range, & something tells me ye olde people divorce too.
Define "factor"
Facebook doesn't cause divorces. People cause divorces. Guns don't kill people. People kill people. Both guns and Facebook are inanimate tools, that are initiated by volition. These tools just make it easy to shoot ourselves in the feet and rightfully so. We must exercise caution when using any tool. Personal responsibility lies with us until the tools malfunction.
Heroes die once, cowards live longer.
So I can get a woman and finally get laid? :P
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Before, the guys would go to the pub, or hunt, or fish, or play soccer, whatever, with their friends, complaint about their wives to each other, harmlessly flirt with a girl or two. Girls would go shopping or have a drink, or go to the gym, whatever, with their friend girls, complaint about their husbands, check out some good looking dudes, no problem.
Everybody needs to blow some steam once in a while. It's really, really hard to keep a marriage. It takes lots of patience and you need to go out and decompress or else looking at your spouse's face every fucking day will become unbearable. People used to talk to friends and have a few drinks, words would be forgotten overnight. Now, every little fucking detail of what you do or say gets recorded forever. This is not the way normal life is meant to be.
I don't know who is more stupid. People having behaviours online that can put them in trouble, knowing they'll be publicly available forever, or their spouses, spying on them and them overreacting to things that would be perfectly normal if they hadn't happened online.
Divorces are painful and destructive. You basically have to turn all your life inside out. You destroy your children's world. Is it worth it because of pesky things like Facebook blabbering? If you don't have the stomach to put up with a lot of stuff you should never have gotten married and had kids in the first place.
Choosing a sample of people from one website for a poll about how often another website appears in their life (whether in divorce proceedings or elsewhere) instantly introduces unreasonable bias, in so far as people who are using one website are much more likely to be using other websites too, and those people who will take polls on websites is a smaller, probably more active, fraction again. I suspect that if you took this poll offline and conducted a proper study, the percentage would be much lower.
"DivorceOnline" sampled 5000 divorced couples. Were they users of DivorceOnline? Were these 5000 folks chosen from a particularly tech-friendly subset of the overall divorced population?
This just in! Slashdot poll reveals 50% of adult males still live with their parents.
Why stick up for big business?
Inappropriate messages to members of the opposite sex; Separated spouses posting nasty comments about each other; and, Facebook friends reporting spouse’s behaviour.
I'm posting to slashdot, so obviously I'm no expert on interpersonal relationships. However, the reasons given for divorce seem to always be present in bad relationships. People have talked bad about each other, engaged in behaviors with members of the opposite (or same) sex in ways that make your spouse jealous, and heard about how bad thier spouse is long before we had facebook. I'm pretty sure these have been problems in relationships as long as there were homo sapiens. I'm pretty sure these problems will still exist after facebook is gone.
Now, everything someone says is recorded because they think people care to read what they have to say, so you can not delete what you say, and as usual, people will put their foot in their mouths, and now will pay for it. Back in the day with no social media, you would say something to someone knowing that it was a private conversation, and that if ever it came down to it, it would be the accuser's words against theirs...leading to a confrontation, where as today, no confrontation, proof is in black and white, can be printed off, and mailed to the unlucky bastard who thought his wife really loved him, where all along she was putting up with him only to make sure she had stability...
Talk is cheap, and actions speak louder than words, usually you will see in advance how much someone really likes a person. If this remains strong in the relationship for a long time, there will be no problems...
...but it seems to me that documenting your infidelity on a public forum that was designed for tracking an analyzing your behavior is just stupid. Deeply so. In fact, so fucking stupid that there ought to be extra penalties for the idiots who get caught this way.
"It's not MY fault we're divorced, it's facebooks. It has NOTHING to do with me cheating or talking dirty to someone outside my current relationship"
Typical human thought pattern for getting caught being a sad excuse for human. It's never there fault for comitting the action, it's whatever got them caught. Shifting blame as usual.
Who needs the media? Everyone is their own personal news caster these days.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
thats what makes FaceBook so great for such things.
When you as a LEO/lawyer know XYZ but can't find evidence (so you can't Court Of Law KNOW XYZ) then if you can get something from Facebook to convince a Judge to give you a warrant to go Looking for your evidence you most likely have it made.
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
"Keeping your marriage together? That's a Plus!"
"Other People" a Factor in a Third of UK Divorces. There, fixed it.
No, you're still the first fuck wit.
The thing to take away from this is not that Facebook is bad, but rather that people today don't feel bad about flirting. If two people get married and want to stay married they probably just need to get used to it.
Did the author of this "study" ever consider that the results are complete crap? The survey was conducted on the Internet, so of course its possible a high percentage might cite a website.
Do the same survey of a much broader audience and I think you'd see the facebook-divorce disappear in the noise.