The Reverend Cedric Miller of Neptune, New Jersey, made a series of headlines in 2010 when he announced from the pulpit that married members of his congregation should delete their Facebook accounts, or risk temptation that would damage their marriages. His sermon generated coverage that spread well beyond the religious press because it articulated, in blunter terms than most people were using at the time, a concern that relationship counselors were beginning to document in their practices.

The pattern that concerned Miller and the therapists he was citing was specific: spouses reconnecting with former romantic partners on Facebook, communication that began innocuously and escalated, emotional and eventually physical infidelity that the participants described as surprising in its speed and intensity. The platform was not causing these infidelities in any simple sense — the desires and vulnerabilities that led to them predated Facebook. But Facebook was, counselors reported, dramatically accelerating a process that had previously taken months or years and now took weeks.

The research on social media and infidelity that followed Miller's sermon generally supported the broad concern, though not necessarily his proposed solution. Facebook and similar platforms were associated with higher rates of contact with former partners, which was in turn associated with higher rates of infidelity among people in relationships. The association was moderated by relationship quality — people in satisfied relationships showed less of the effect — which suggested that social media was amplifying existing relationship problems rather than creating new ones from whole cloth.

What the Facebook-infidelity discussion revealed was that people had not developed adequate frameworks for managing the access that digital platforms gave them to their pasts, or the intimacy that text communication could generate much faster than face-to-face interaction. The technology changed faster than the social norms for using it.