http://wondrousterrific.com/en/2-signs/6-end-time




Facebook friends sway teens to smoke and drink, study says

Tell your favorite teen: Their Facebook friends are a bad influence. A new study has found that teenagers who see photographs of their friends drinking and smoking on Facebook and MySpace are more likely to drink and smoke themselves. "Our study shows that adolescents can be influenced by their friends' online pictures to smoke and drink alcohol," lead researcher Thomas Valente, of the University of Southern California, told Agence France-Presse. "The evidence suggests that friends’ online behaviors are a viable source of peer influence,” Grace Huang, one of the researchers, said. "This is important to know, given that 95 percent of 12- to 17-year olds in the United States access the Internet every day, and 80 percent of those youth use online social networking sites to communicate."