Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB): A blessing or Curse, Researcher Findings

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Today, one of the largest challenges in medicine is to struggle and discover ways to utilize social media to improve health.  The Annals of Internal Medicine has showed a report which suggests that we might be exploiting social media giant Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) in new and ingenious ways and could utilize it with multiple diseases. HIV was taken in the case. Researchers have taken 112 minority gay males as sample, which is the fastest growing HIV population, to be in one of two Facebook groups. The first group dealt with HIV prevention, and the second considered measures to general health. After 12 weeks, people in the HIV Facebook group were in fact 44 percent more prone to ask for a home HIV testing kit. This reflected very essential facts that people can be educated through social media and steps could be taken that impact their own health.

A new report suggests that using the social website could increase the possibility for teenagers to drink and smoke. Dr Thomas Valente, professor of preventive medicine at the University of Southern California and the study’s principal investigator said that adolescents are influenced by their friends smoking and drinking alcohol in photographs posted on the social network. Dr Valente and his team examined the behavior of 1,563 students of age 15 and 16 about their online and offline friendship networks, their smoking, their alcohol consumption and the frequency of their social media use. The researchers concluded that the magnitude of a student’s online network of friends was not significantly related with dicey behavior.

Dr Grace Huang, the study’s first and corresponding author said that the evidence suggests that teens are influenced by friends’ online behaviors. Teenagers whose close friends do not drink alcohol have more probability to be affected by exposure to risky online pictures. Dr Huang, who is a post-doctoral fellow at the National Cancer Institute, said considering their study findings that it may be favorable to educate teens about the dangerous effects of posting risky behaviors online and how those pictures can negatively affect their friends. Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) shares were up 1.47%, at $41.90 in current session.


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