If you are involved in a car accident or other accident in which someone else is at fault, you may be tempted to tell your friends and family on social media. Unfortunately, this can lead to serious issues if you have to make a personal injury claim. To prevent social media from causing issues with your personal injury case, following the below five steps.
- Make Sure No One Else Can Access Your Account If you use a computer that is used by other people, sign out and change your password. Someone who accesses your account could accidentally post something that would hurt your case, or could post something as a joke that would have serious consequences. Make sure you are responsible for any posts that go up on your social media accounts.
- Do Not Friend Anyone You Do Not Know An investigator may attempt to friend or follow you in order to get access to your information. If someone friends you and they are not a close personal friend, do not accept their request until your personal injury case is complete.
- Change All Social Media Accounts to Private If they are not already, you should change all access to your social media accounts to private. You can count on the fact that investigators are going to try and find personal information on you – and they will use any public social media posts to do so. That said, do not assume that anything that is marked private cannot be accessed – do not post anything during your case.
- Do Not Friend Your Lawyer If you need to discuss your social media account with your attorney, you should do so in their office. This is for your own protection. The truth is that posts that seem entirely innocent to you could actually affect your case. In some instances, the less your attorney knows the better.
- Never Delete or Edit Old Posts Anything you have already posted should be left as-is. Yes, you can make it private but if you actually make changes to your posts – or delete them altogether – it could potentially be seen as tampering with evidence. Again, this can be true even if it was not your intention to do so. Tampering with evidence could not only affect your civil case but could lead to criminal charges.
