Why Facebook may be unwittingly exposing your kid to underage drinking

Facebook wasn't even around five years ago and now it is may be a central part of your teen's social activity. With over 250 million users, it's doubtful that Facebook hasn't impacted your teen's life in some way, even if they are not registered users of the social networking site.

Roughly one third of active users are under the age of 21. One of the revenue streams for Facebook is through advertising. Facebook pages, applications, events and groups allow users to share photos, events, links, invitations and a whole host of other items with their "friends." When your son or daughter joins a group, or even takes a quiz, it allows outside folks outside of their "friend group" access to their information -- not their profile name or location, but just general info about them, so that they can receive customized advertising. This customized advertising can come from anywhere and it seems to be coming more and more from companies promoting alcohol. It is a very low cost, extremely targeted method of advertising. In fact, much of this advertising is free to them.

The explosion of alcohol-related content on Facebook has recently been studied in a ground-breaking report "Alcohol promotion on Facebook," which was recently published in the Journal of Global Drug Policy and Practice. Some highlights:

• The authors found more than 2,200 Facebook Events associated with the five top-selling beer brands and an additional 2,200 events associated with the five top-selling spirits brands.
• When authors entered the term "alcohol" in the Facebook search engine, it brought up more than 58,000 Groups with more than 5,000 total Groups for the top-selling beer brands.
• Paid alcohol ads on Facebook are relatively few, compared with thousands of alcohol-related Pages, Applications, Events and Groups that are forwarded and shared among users. This amounts to free "viral" advertising that is not subject to Facebook's guidelines for alcohol advertising and is accessible to users under 21.

The report concludes with several recommendations for regulating alcohol-related content on Facebook, including better enforcement of existing rules by external monitors and putting a stop to all alcohol-related Pages, Applications, Events and Groups. Whether Facebook will make any effort to rein in alcohol-related content on its site remains to be seen. In the mean time, it's more important than ever for parents, teachers and youth leaders to be informed and ready to talk with kids about what's okay and what's not on Facebook. Just like TV was once an area that parents needed to monitor, now it is Facebook.

And the only way to really effectively monitor Facebook is to insist that your teen "friend" you.

How may parents have followed this advice?