American divorce lawyers and academics have stated this week that Facebook is now cited in 65 percent of all divorces in the United States, despite divorce levels remaining relatively stable in the fast few years.
Says Dr. Steven Kimmons, a clinical psychologist and marriage counsellor at Loyola University Medical Centre near Chicago (via Guardian):
We’re coming across it more and more. One spouse connects online with someone they knew from school. The person is emotionally available and they start communicating through Facebook.
A survey by the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers (AAML) showed a huge jump in divorce cases citing social networking sites, with Facebook at the top at 65 percent, followed by MySpace at 14 percent and Twitter at 5 percent.
The sites weren’t only used to show off evidence of infidelity but also used in custody cases, where spouses could point out pictures of drug and alcohol use by their husband/wife.
Facebook has 600 million users worldwide.
Result for: social networking site
After reaching a $65 million settlement with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg back in 2008, ConnectU founders Tyler and Cameron Winkelvoss are now appealing the settlement.
The twins agreed to a settlement in 2008 that got them $20 million in cash and $45 million in stock, valued at $36 per share. Now, the pair are alleging that they were misled about the real value of Facebook stock in 2008, and have brought the case to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.
A skeptical three judge panel began considering today whether the Winkelvoss twins have a case. They scrutinized the argument put forward by the twins through attorney Jerome Falk. “The (ConnectU) founders are pretty smart people themselves, the twins also have a father from Wharton School who is very bright,” Judge John Wallace said.
“If you have all these people to advise you, isn’t it difficult to say this is one of those things where you were taken advantage of?”
Wallace was pointing out that the settlement was reached by teams of lawyers and a top mediator. The Winkelvoss brothers had valued the Facebook stock based on a news report that Microsoft had bought a small piece of the social networking site in a deal that valued the stock at around $36, and the company at $15 billion.
Result for: social networking site
It appears that how popular you are on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter actually had a real world effect on the November elections in the United States.
Candidates with more “likes” on Facebook won 71 percent of the time in the Senate elections while candidates with more Twitter followers won 74 percent of the time.
Facebook said that in 77 of the 118 races it followed in the Senate and the House, the winner had more “likes” than the opponent did.
If you had double the amount of “likes,” the average margin of victory was 3.9 percent.
There also seemed to be a correlation to money raised and spent, as one big spender, Jeff Greene of Florida, spent $24 million and did not even win his primary. The primary winner, Kendrick Meek, had 24,000 “likes” on Facebook to Greene’s lowly 644.
Of course, social networking popularity did not help a few high profile candidates like “I am not a witch” Christine O’Donnell, who was very popular on Twitter and Facebook but got crushed in the election by 17 percent. Meg Whitman, the billionaire, spent the most money and had the third highest amount of Facebook likes but still lost the California governor race.
Says ABC News: “[Social media] provides information about comparisons…trends and changes could be informative on the subset of people on it. You get more information out of it if you respect limitations. If you try to get too much, you get nothing.”
