Remember the Puritans settled in the North. In any case wherever this originates, the US's puritanical tendencies (compared to continental Europe) don't seem to be exclusively a southern thing.
There was just last week a big upheaval in Belgium about a collection of facebook pages where pictures, including names and classes and ... of the girls involved in them were being spread on a number of facebook pages.
Most of them were closed with the help of the police, and the case seems closed now. But in reality it just caused them to hide themselves a bit better, and there's one still open that doesn't hide it at all.
A few weeks before there was a suicide not far from where I live which the guy involved blamed on facebook. There was a similar case in Britain.
I know someone in New York City whose parents nearly kicked her out of the house when they discovered she was having sex with her boyfriend. It is not just the south; there are plenty of idiots in the "liberal northeast" also.
I'm not sure why some cultures, or even sub-sub-cultures, feel like they have the right to trample the values of the rest of the world just because "it's the internet". Why should those people adapt, instead of the internet adapting to respect other values?
Interesting to see if society can adapt