Law firm claims as many as 20% of modern divorces cite Facebook in filings

A limited study of 5,436 divorce cases by a law firm found that around 20% of the filings cited the popular social networking site Facebook.

Out of all the cases, the most commonly pinpointed reason was sexually inappropriate chats with someone other than a spouse- divorce-online’s Mark Keenan told press:

‘I heard from my staff there were a lot of people saying they had found out things about their partners on Facebook and I decided to see how prevalent it was.

‘I was really surprised to see 20 per cent of all the petitions containing references to Facebook. The most common reason seemed to be people having inappropriate sexual chats with people they were not supposed to.’

Although Facebook probably causes divorces as often as text messages lead to teenagers having sex (i.e., a convenient vehicle for the inevitable), the website has been a boon to one party divorce-wise. Lawyers say the site is an “evidentiary goldmine,” with words posted in a moment of passion or anger henceforth belonging to the ether of the internet and irretractable.

A statistic I’d really be interested in seeing? The profit increase of divorce lawyers due to Facebook.