E-Discovery » E-Discovery Tip: Facebook Has A Long Memory

E-Discovery Tip: Facebook Has A Long Memory

June 23, 2015

THOUGHT BALOON 420

A federal court case from early this year serves as a cautionary tale in a post from e-discovery software company Zapproved. The caution: Courts look at social media like any other form of evidence in discovery, and it must be preserved accordingly. In this case, a plaintiff making an injury claim against his employer deflected the defendant’s company request to see data from his Facebook account by replying, four days after he received the request, that he didn’t “presently” have one. The judge came down hard on the plaintiff, ordering him to provide his login credentials to any account he “claims to have once had but can no longer access,” so the defendant company can make its own determination. “Counsel should always probe the extent of their clients’ social media evidence. They should also be leery when clients disclaim the existence of any such accounts,” the authors write. “Many of these parties forget that long after they remove or obscure posts or photographs, Facebook’s activity log will record a digital trail. Discrepancies between the trail and the actual page will likely raise even greater suspicion as to why the posts were hidden or deleted.”

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