• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, April 17, 2015

You can file this one under “hurtful” but also “hilarious:” a third of young adults in the UK have stopped using a social network because their parents started using it, according to a survey of 2,003 Brits conducted by the Halifax Digital Home Index in February. Unsurprisingly, the trend has gathered speed as more older adults have joined the networks, rendering them unfit for habitation by normal people with a plague of sheer oldness.

Overall, the Halifax DHI found 32% of Brits ages 16-34 have deleted their Facebook account because family members were using it, and 33% have blocked a family member on the social network. Meanwhile, 11% of people in the younger group said they have deliberately chosen to use a certain social media channel because their family either doesn’t know about it or can’t connect with them there because the network is anonymous, including Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat.

Of course the younger age group has plenty of its own bizarre, not to say laughable, behaviors. For example, 26% admitted they use smartphones to talk to family members who are in the same house. And 19% use their smartphones during family dinners (which actually seems low to me, given what I have observed). Younger Brits spend an average of three hours a day using their smartphones, compared to an hour a day for the over-35 set.

Last year a survey conducted by UK mobile provider Three found that 29% of British children have been embarrassed by their parents online, prompting 30% of social media users ages 18-34 to block or delete their parents from Facebook.

Nonetheless, Facebook remains the most widely used social network among teens here in the U.S. Last week, Pew released results of a survey showing that 71% of teens use Facebook, followed by 52% for Instagram, 41% for Snapchat, 33% for Twitter, 33% for Google+, 24% for Vine, and 14% for Tumblr.