Let’s face it. Our love of social media has grown and grown in the past decade. Most of us can’t live a day without Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Messenger. We share photos, opinions, events, etc in real time. In other words, social media has changed the way we communicate and live.
Social media is also an extraordinary source of evidence. An increasing number of lawyers use the data representing people’s behavior, attitudes, feelings and relationships for research purposes. The problem is many legal professionals don’t know how to access and preserve this data in an efficient way. If you are one of those lawyers keep scrolling to learn how to access and collect social media evidence. Here we go!
Find Your Sources
Yes, most people like to share and comment on Facebook and Twitter, but claimants may not only comment or post relevant communications there, but they might also discuss pertinent issues on different forums, chat rooms, or websites. Thus, the first step to finding the relevant social media evidence is finding out which platforms or services the claimant spends time on. So, consider using people-search engines such as Pipl.com or ZabaSearch. Those engines can provide a list and links to active accounts for an individual using their full name, commonly used username, email address, or mailing address. Running a people search can even help lawyers uncover a claimant’s anonymous or fake account.
Understand Your Sources
Lawyers who want to access a claimant’s social media account to collect information should answer the following questions:
Is all of a user’s activity public, including comments, posts, etc.?
Do I have to “friend” or “follow” the user to access their activity?
Can a user’s activity be concealed, modified, or deleted?
The answers to these questions will determine whether you can access the claimant’s information and collect the key data or no.
Properly Preserve the Relevant Posts
When you observe something on social media in real time, capture it immediately before the information is hidden, altered or deleted. When it comes to properly preserving the social media evidence, you may have several options.
First, you can save your initial findings to a PDF and print to paper from the PDF file whenever you want.
A better method of preserving social media evidence is to take a screenshot. Both Windows and Mac operating systems have tools to capture and save a screenshot. The easiest method is the “Print Screen” (“PrtScn”) key on your keyboard. Just press “Alt + Print Screen” or “Fn + Print Screen” or “Windows key + Print Screen” to capture the screen’s image or part of it.
Remember, no matter what method you choose, make sure you save the date (usually at the top or bottom of the page) and the web address (URL address) of the page.
However, it’s not simply enough to take a screenshot or save the page to a PDF (you are preserving what you see.) But we also need the behind-the-scenes information (metadata) Thus, it’s crucially important to utilize the right software and tools built specifically for collecting and preserving online and social media content, including all available metadata such as date, time, location, poster’s IP address, and browser used.
Final Thoughts
As people tend to share more information on social media than ever, the incredible amount of content will continue to grow and often be relevant to litigation. I’m sure these tips will help you quickly and appropriately find and preserve social media evidence and introduce them to court.
