Cape Town - You,re a nasty, lying, cheating, devious bastard and I never want to see you again, ever! We are through, finished, it is over – understand?
Twitter might use a maximum of just 140 characters, like this Tweet, but that’s more than enough to get the message across in no uncertain terms. And it seems that the reason for the proliferation of such messages may just be... well, the use of Twitter.
That’s according to new research just published in Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking, billed as an authoritative peer-reviewed monthly journal that explores the psychological and social issues surrounding the internet.
In a paper, The Third Wheel: The Impact of Twitter Use on Relationship Infidelity and Divorce, journalism PhD candidate Russell Clayton of the University of Missouri-Columbia presents the findings of his study that explored the relationship between active Twitter use, Twitter-related conflict and negative relationship outcomes.
He evaluated the amount of time a person spent on Twitter, how much conflict arose between couples as a result of active Twitter use and whether negative relationship outcomes were associated with active Twitter use and Twitter-related conflict.
He also looked at whether the duration of the relationship had any impact on these outcomes.
“The introduction of social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter has provided a relatively new platform for interpersonal communication and, as a result, has substantially enhanced and altered the dynamics of interpersonal relationships,” he says in his paper.
Twitter, created in 2006 and once deemed merely an “information network”, is now considered one of the most popular social networking sites, with more than 554 million active users tweeting about 58 million times a day and competing with Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn.
“Although Facebook and MySpace have received a great deal of empirical attention, research investigating the effects of Twitter use on interpersonal relationships has been somewhat limited, despite Twitter’s increasing popularity,” he says.
Clayton’s study involved 581 Twitter users aged between 18 and 67 – 63 percent of them men – who completed a 20-question online survey.
These included demographic questions, as well as questions about participants’ perceived levels of Twitter use, whether they’d encountered relationship conflict with their current or former partner as a result of Twitter use, and whether Twitter use had led to break-up or divorce, emotional cheating, or physical cheating with a current or former partner.
“The results from this study suggest that active Twitter use leads to greater amounts of Twitter-related conflict among romantic partners, which in turn leads to infidelity, break-up, and divorce. This indirect effect is not contingent on the length of the romantic relationship,” he concludes.
Cape Argus