How Social Media Evidence Plays Out in Personal Injury Litigation
BISWIRE/March 30, 2025 — Social media is fast becoming a global culture. For instance, most Americans have at least one social media account, and most are available for public view.
Perhaps you wonder who is interested in your social media content. When you have a personal injury case, personal injury attorneys and others will hover around your account.
They want to know what you have been posting. They will also monitor the other party’s social media activities to know how to strategize and build their evidence.
The Focus of the Search
“Everyone looking at your account during a personal injury case wants to find the horror stories,” says attorney Matthew D. Shaffer of Schechter, Shaffer & Harris, LLP Accident & Injury Attorneys.
Although the law bars attorneys from “befriending” people on social media to gain access to their private accounts, which are accessible only to their friends, they can freely assess public accounts. Attorneys can get the information they need from unrestricted accounts.
Also, some law firms pay subscription fees for “skip trace” software. The users named it so because they often use it to find debtors who fled town without informing their creditors. They use the software to locate debtors’ forwarding addresses.
The software can find phone numbers, email addresses, court histories, property details, home addresses, and social media accounts.
How Access Can Change the Game
Gaining access to a defendant’s account is helpful to attorneys. That is why some intentionally ask if a defendant has social media accounts in a discovery or interrogatory request. They will cross-reference the information.
Unfortunately, they do not mostly match up. These discrepancies empower lawyers to return to the defense and question their alleged lack of social media accounts.
If you can unravel their account and get information relevant to the case, you can confront them with the information and their denial of owning an account.
Many legal professionals believe you can still confront the defense even if the person did not post about the case because social media is a tool for openness.
Drawing Examples from the Courtroom
However, according to Maryland Rule 5-901, the appropriate person must authenticate social media posts before the court can admit them into evidence. The Maryland Court of Appeals focused on the need for social media proof to possess unique features to overshadow the likelihood that someone hacked or manipulated the account in Griffin v. State (2011).
However, in Sublet v. State (2015), the court used the "reasonable juror" principle. The standard requires only the proof to be enough to support a claim that the issue at hand is what its proponents claim.
How To Handle Denial
When the defendant denies creating, editing, or deleting any post, lawyers can engage a vendor to use a social media collection application to produce a searchable file. The app captures posts' content and their metadata. They contain the following distinctive features: the originating device's IP address, hash values, the date and time someone created or deleted a post, and the GPS location where someone snapped a picture.
Lawyers should not hesitate to hire forensic experts if the social media post they want to use is crucial to their case’s success. If you do it wrongly, it will backfire and spoil your case. Most importantly, you must be highly selective if you want to use social media as evidence.
You must narrowly tailor your demand to make it relevant.
Caution to Clients
Also, personal injury lawyers must implore their clients to preserve and review their social media records. A plaintiff's contradictory post on social media can be a massive disadvantage to courtroom claims. Imagine someone with a back injury claim having a Facebook photo on a mechanical bull or someone claiming backache but rocking a friend’s party two days after an accident.
Social media is a weapon that people can use either way. Hence, you must be cautious with it.
