Social media sites like Twitter and Facebook are more and more becoming implements for legal proceedings. Courts have found uses for the social media for everything ranging from divorce proceedings to serving legal claims. Given that many people broadcast the details of their personal life on such sites, tweets and status updates have become a repository for legal evidence.
The trend of submitting activity on social media sites is increasingly common; since 2010, social media has been a key component to nearly 700 cases in the United States. Unless you’ve got some kind of Fort Knox security on your Facebook and Twitter accounts, lawyers have a pretty easy go at finding evidence on these sites for a person’s psychological state or corroborating claims of a person’s location at a specific time. To illustrate how exactly litigators go about using social media in the court room, family law firm Dishon & Block put together an infographic that details some of the ways in which these sites are used.
And as if we need to say it anymore: seriously, revisit your security settings on your social media accounts and be mindful of what you’re sharing with the world.
[Via AllTwitter.]