Producing an Entire Social Networking Profile May Not Always Be Necessary

During a civil trial, one party may request that the other produce their entire social networking profile. However, this request is not always granted.

Social networking profiles and information contained in them such as posts, photos, private messages and chat logs are increasingly being requested by eDiscovery firms during the document review process of civil trials. However, according to one recent legal case, these requests are not always going to be granted.

Legal News Source reported that in the case of Tompkins v. Detroit Metro Airport, the defendant introduced a motion so that the plaintiff would have to produce the entirety of her Facebook profile, including sections that are private and not accessible to the general public. The case involved a slip and fall that happened at the airport.

However, according to the court, there are no privacy rights accorded to posts only accessible to a certain group of people such as the Facebook friends of the plaintiff. This type of information is not privileged according to common law or civil law. But the court went on to say that during the discovery process, a party does not have a general right to access portions of a social media profile of the opposing party that have been hidden from being viewable to the public. What needed to be demonstrated was that the information being requested would have a reasonable chance of netting usable evidence.

The request was made by the defendant after the plaintiff was shown in public Facebook photos holding a little dog and being able to stand without assistance at a party. The intent of the defendant may have been to show that the plaintiff was not as severely injured as she claimed she was. The defendant stated that looking through posts only accessible to friends may have revealed information to corroborate this. The judge in this case disagreed with the defendant, explaining instead that the photos publicly viewable on Facebook did not show any inconsistencies with the medical information submitted to the court by the plaintiff. In the opinion of the court, showing an entire Facebook account would not have been useful for the discovery or the firm’s document review process, as the request was “overly broad” and could contain large quantities of personal information which had zero relevance to the case being heard in front of the court.

According to the opinion of some legal professionals, there may be cases where producing the entirety of a social media account would be appropriate. In any case, parties that receive such a request are encouraged to seek professional legal advice to determine whether the request is relevant and whether some information contained in the social networking account might be privileged. Regarding the discovery process, a complete social media account is no different than requesting an entire hard disk or email account. If there are grounds to do so, the data may be produced in its entirety. But there are cases where only a portion of it may be discoverable in court.