Facebook cheating – it’s complicated

Facebook activity is the primary source of tension for one in five couples, according to the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers (AAML), who have released the top reasons for divorce.

A report by the AAML found that postings and photographs from the social network site provide more damning evidence of infidelity or lies about activities than any other source, according to mobiledia.com. Lawyers are increasingly demanding to see clients’ Facebook pages to use such evidence in divorce proceedings, suggesting that social media is becoming a way to gauge trust and truthfulness.

“If you publicly post any contradictions to previously made statements and promises, an estranged spouse will certainly be one of the first people to notice and make use of that evidence,” said Marlene Eskind Moses, the AAML’s president.

Four out of five lawyers report that evidence derived from social media sites has increased dramatically in the past five years, according to a recent AAML survey.
In the past gathering evidence was difficult if not impossible. Social media has changed all that as sites like Facebook expose people’s private lives.

Facebook’s power in relationships is massive, compared to the impact of microblogs and other social media sources: only about 14 percent of divorce cases involve MySpace and just 5 percent Twitter.

Whether you are married or just in a relationships, facebookcheating.com is one website advising facebook users on how to deal with everything from divorce proceedings and social media right through to determining if you are being cheated on. Even if you have been the naughty one, posts like Advice After Doing the Cheating – Please Help Out Laura will help you get through it.

Determining when your relationship is going to be on the rocks has even come down to being a Facebook science of sort. According to David Kirkpatrick’s book, The Facebook Effect as service’s engineers built more and more tools that could uncover insights into relationships, Mark Zuckerberg sometimes amused himself by conducting experiments.

In the book, Kirkpatrick says Zuckerberg concluded that by examining friend relationships and communications patterns he could determine with about 33 percent accuracy who a user was going to be in a relationship with a week from now. To deduce this he studied who was looking which profiles, who your friends were friends with, and who was newly single, among other indicators.

What were some of the determining factors? Are you busy chatting with another girl instead of your girlfriend? Are you being tagged in a lot of photos with the same person? Facebook has a lot of information about who you are viewing regularly (or lusting over) as well as what your communication patterns are. While the company is not actively charting most users’ communication patterns for determining the future of their relationships, they are actively monitoring behaviours on the site to determine what should be displayed in the feed.