Social Media And Social Privacy

Whether you ‘like’ it or not, Social Media is having a major impact on the legal battlefield and both individuals and corporations need to navigate this world very carefully.

Consider. Facebook claims that more than one billion people are active on its site. Twitter asserts to have more than 150 million tweets a day from some 980 million accounts. YouTube boasts some 300 hours of uploaded video every minute. Instagram says more than 100 million people use its service every month. Other burgeoning Social Media sites such as LinkedIn, Vine, Foursquare, WeChat, Viber, WhatsApp and SnapCha and others have legions of users.

That is a tsunami of material that can reveal a great deal of information -- good and bad and everything in between. Social

In much the same way that e-mail became a rich source of discovery material beginning a decade or so ago, Social Media is finding its way into courtrooms more and more with the potential of turning litigation on its ear.

‘Just a minute’…you say. I have all these ‘privacy’ settings on my Social Media sites or certain of my postings and/or blogs are password protected. It doesn’t matter. If information is relevant to a lawsuit, it is discoverable even if it is subject to your privacy settings.

Just about every jurisdiction in the U.S. now allows for e-discovery of Social Media information. The art is that attorneys cannot just use a shotgun approach and ask for everything. If lawyers accurately describe the reason they are asking for specific Social Media information and highlight its relevance to the case, it can be obtained. Bottom line: in civil litigation both an individual’s privacy preferences and the Social Media’s website privacy protocols will yield to the regulations of

Take, for example, the disgruntled employee who alleges a hostile workplace. Social Media evidence may disclose a workplace that is not hostile at all. Or how about the company that intentionally or even inadvertently purloins copyrighted material for its website? Talk about a smoking gun in plain sight!

The question now, of course, for individuals and companies alike in the face of the prevalence of Social Media is how to protect oneself from legal liability.

Social Media exposure and potential liability can be considerable. What if one of you employees posts something on a company blog that is potentially liable? What if one of your employees is at a party as an individual and makes an unauthorized comment about the firm? What if someone in your public company makes an unsanctioned announcement on a Facebook or Twitter page? The law says that all investors should receive important company information at the same time as to not affect stock prices. Recently the head of Netflix misspoke and bragged that his online streaming service had reached the one billion viewing plateau before it was announced anywhere else. What if someone in your firm reposts a copyrighted photo for your company’s website without permission? That could be a whopping $150,000 gaffe