Latest Facebook infection: syphilis!

I'll be the first to admit that the evidence sounds a bit thin, but the Telegraph is reporting about a UK-based study that found a rise in syphilis in three areas of Britain with above-average Facebook use. It's not as if playing Farmville is going to give you a sexually-transmitted disease -- although I can't prove that conclusively -- so how did the researchers explain the link?

Turns out the people who used social networking sites more frequently were also using them to arrange more casual hookups. In other words, a key assumption of the study is that Facebook can successfully get you laid. I'll just have to take their word for it, I guess, but these British researchers found that people had arranged encounters with multiple partners over Facebook, probably leading to the uptick in the number of infections.

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