Can my social media account negatively impact my personal injury case?

Social media has become an everyday part of the lives of millions of people. There are some individuals – many of them, in fact – who check their Facebook profile when they first wake up in the morning and continue the process all throughout their day and evening. It has almost become second nature to share even the intimate details of our lives, posting an astonishing amount of information about ourselves and our health with the simple click of a button. And because we tend to post to social media websites so thoughtlessly and give away so much information about ourselves, the things that we say can have a huge impact on legal proceedings.

Can social media really impact my personal injury case?

To put the this simply, the answer is a resounding “yes”! It might not seem like posting a picture on Instagram or talking about your day on Facebook could provide any meaningful insight regarding your life, but you might be surprised. In a personal injury case, much of the value of your claims often lies in pain and suffering. In more serious cases, you might be hoping to argue that you should be compensated for an injury that has lowered your overall quality of life as well as your ability to enjoy the things you used to enjoy.

Let’s say that you were seriously injured in an accident and are now living with chronic pain as a result. You feel as though you have lost much of your ability to enjoy life in general, and believe you deserve compensation for that pain and loss of quality of life. Over the course of the investigation, during the time in which defense attorneys dedicated their time to finding any kind of information possible to discredit or lessen your claims, you made a few seemingly innocuous posts on Facebook. Maybe you complained about mowing the lawn in the heat, for example, or posted about hanging new curtains or putting in window air conditioning units. The defense now has evidence that implies that you are not as affected by the accident as you claim because you are still able to do things like maintain your yard and move heavy objects. Surely if the pain was so bad, you wouldn’t be able to do these things, right? Note that the same holds true for emotional distress and trauma. Even the simplest of posts about enjoying your day could be used as evidence that you are not as emotionally affected by the accident as you claim.

How to Avoid the Danger

The simplest way to avoid the danger of sharing too much on social media is simply to stop using it for the duration of the investigation and subsequent legal hearings. If you don’t post anything at all, then you know there’s nothing there that can be used against you. If you must use social media, then you must absolutely avoid any discussion regarding your accident and the legal proceedings, including conversations with your lawyer or even information about your medical diagnosis and treatments that you have experienced.

For more information about how social media can impact your case as well as how you can avoid the danger, reach out to our experienced attorneys today!