Does Twitter Cause Cheating?

Another day, another study. There’s a study out today that links Twitter use to infidelity and divorce. This Slate article shoots holes in the study’s conclusions.

I think the important point is that the divorce rate is not going up, it’s fairly steady, so even if Twitter were causing divorce, chances are it’s a divorce that would have happened any way. The same researcher issued a similar report about Facebook last year that found that excessive Facebook use was damaging to relationships, and this year he found that excessive Tweeting was damaging to relationships. Again, to me that doesn’t reveal any intrinsic flaws in the technology, just in its overuse.

You could draw the same conclusion about the excessive use of home brewing, or bowling, or anything else that takes up too much of a partner’s time. Any new, popular technology seems to have a target on its back, with people lining up to knock it down a peg, but I don’t think this study succeeds.