Facebook friends can induce risky behaviour: study Facebook: Social networks can encourage teenagers to engage in risky behaviour. Mum was probably right about this: hanging out with the wrong crowd on social networks can encourage teenagers to engage in risky behaviours such as drinking and smoking. A new study concludes that teenagers who see friends smoking and drinking in photos posted on Facebook and Myspace are more likely to smoke and drink themselves. Adolescents can be influenced by their friends' online pictures to smoke or drink alcohol. Thomas Valente, University of Southern California "Our study shows that adolescents can be influenced by their friends' online pictures to smoke or drink alcohol," said Thomas Valente of the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine and the study's principal investigator. To our knowledge, this is the first study to apply social network analysis methods to examine how teenagers' activities on online social networking sites influence their smoking and alcohol use. Valente and his team drew conclusions from a survey of 1563 students from the El Monte Union High School District in Los Angeles County in October 2010 and April 2011. The researchers found that the size of someone's online network of friends was not a major factor associated with risky behaviour but that exposure to friends' online pictures of partying or drinking was linked to smoking and alcohol use. Teenagers whose close friends did not drink alcohol were more likely to be affected by increasing exposure to risky online pictures. "The evidence suggests that friends' online behaviours are a viable source of peer influence," said researcher Grace Huang. This is important to know, given that 95 per cent of 12- to 17-year-olds in the United States access the internet every day, and 80 per cent of those youth use online social networking sites to communicate. Students who responded to the survey were evenly distributed across gender and on average 15 years old. About two-thirds were Hispanic and about one-quarter were Asian, roughly the same ethnic distribution of El Monte. In April 2011, nearly 30 per cent of respondents had smoked and more than half had at least one drink of alcohol. The study appears in the September 3 online edition of the Journal of Adolescent Health.