Researchers recruited 18-to-24 year olds and had each recruit up to three friends. These clusters were asked randomly to "like" either an experimental news community promoting sexual health or a control community that provided general interest news for that age group. Of the 942 people following the sex health group for two months, 68 percent reported using a condom in their most recent sex act, compared with 56 percent in the control group. The findings are in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. [Sheana Bull et al., Social Media-Delivered Sexual Health Intervention: A clustered randomized controlled trial]
Previous attempts to make sex safer via Facebook social media campaigns have often failed, perhaps because they felt like a health class lesson. But public health researchers have not let that stop them from trying to make condom use more "likable"—at least in the digital realm.
—Katherine Harmon
