Ask an Attorney - Should I Worry About Posting on Social Media?
I'm Griff Tonkin, and I'm one of the partners here at the Arthofer & Tonkin Law Offices. We're exclusively a personal injury practice. Today is another video in our Ask a Personal Injury Lawyer series.
In this series, we're talking to you about questions that our clients often ask us, or sometimes questions we have to ask our clients. And today's topic is social media. Now, I'm kind of an anti-social media person.
That's my bias, and I'm putting it right out there. You'll never find me with a personal social media account. It was after much cajoling by our excellent office administrator that we finally established a firm Facebook page.
But that's as far as I'll ever go. And if you've been injured in a personal injury accident, and you're a vigorous social media user, you need to be aware. Your social media accounts, even if set to private, probably aren't private, and are probably discoverable.
What that means is, if you're involved in a personal injury accident, one of the first things that's going to happen is the insurance company, or whoever caused your injury, is going to do a social media search. And given some pretty impressive, pretty commonly available technical tools, they're probably going to find everything that you have out there on social media, even on private accounts. And this goes across all social media platforms.
So if you don't want somebody else to know about your life in the context of a personal injury accident, you probably ought not to have it on social media. It's also important to note that after a personal injury accident, anything you put out there on social media could and might likely be used against you. Let me give you a simple example.
You've been injured. You've been injured significantly. But you post on social media a picture of you on a patio boat with your family during the summertime, and you make a simple note about the picture.
Great day on the water with family and friends. That picture could be used against you by an insurance company or the lawyers hired by an insurance company to suggest you're not hurt. Look, so-and-so, she's out there on the boat.
She's having fun. She's with family and friends. She feels so well that she even posted about it on social media.
What your social media post doesn't capture is the fact that you were nagging whoever the person driving the boat was to go slow, and as soon as it got windy, you asked them to take the boat back to the dock so you could get off, and nobody talks about the fact that you spent a day in bed recovering from a basic boat trip because of your injuries from this incident. That's not out there in a social media post. So forgive me for being a little rough.
Forgive me for talking like your dad. But if this is you, and you're a bigger social media user, and you've been injured in a personal injury accident, simply don't talk about it on social media platforms. It's just not worth the hassle of the insurance company and their lawyers who will twist and manipulate anything you might say out there for their purposes.
I know. I've seen this in a lot of cases. When we used to do defense work work way back when, we would check social media accounts then, and I know we would use it against personal injury plaintiffs.
But now, all we do here is use our skills and talents acquired over more than 50 combined years of experience to represent people who've been injured. If you've got social media accounts and you've been in a personal injury action, put that cell phone down, put that tablet down, and don't talk about it. What you should pick up is a phone.
Call our office today for a free consultation. I'm Griff Tonkin, and we welcome the opportunity to hear from you and consult with you about your personal injury matter.
