British bishop’s costly Facebook gaffe

There are an awful lot of teenage users who have a better sense of how impactful their Facebook comments can be than the white-haired Church of England bishop who just lost his job for saying exactly what he thought about the royal engagement on his Facebook page. “The Bishop of Willesden, the Right Reverend Pete Broadbent, said the union between Prince William and Kate Middleton would last about seven years,” the BBC reports. When the news of couple’s engagement broke, he wrote in Facebook that “we need a party in Calais for all good republicans [anti-monarchists] who can’t stand the nauseating tosh that surrounds this event.” I love the understatement at the end of the BBC piece: “Bishop Broadbent was not believed to be among those present at the general synod or during a service of Holy Communion at Westminster Abbey attended by the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh on Tuesday morning.” [As for social networking privacy practices in the US, a recent study found that 67% of parents and 70% of teens understand privacy protection on Facebook, and 52% and 59%, respectively, find the privacy settings clear.]