Judge: Taking Your Facebook Account Private During Litigation Isn't Exactly 'Preserving Evidence'

If your social media "presence" has been submitted as evidence, you'd better leave everything about it unaltered. That's the conclusion reached by the judge presiding over a Fair Housing Act lawsuit. The plaintiff didn't go so far as to delete Facebook posts relevant to the case at hand, but did enough that the defense counsel (representing the landlord) noticed everything wasn't quite the way it was when the plaintiff was ordered to preserve the evidence.

According to one of the lawyers for the defense, she accessed plaintiff's accounts at one point despite not being "friends" with plaintiff. She later looked at the accounts and saw many posts were missing. The Plaintiff also testified that, to her knowledge, she never deleted anything. She did hide a few posts from her timeline which appeared there because she had been tagged by others. She said she thought she originally set her Facebook account to private and she merely double checked this after defendant filed its spoliation motion.

Whether or not the plaintiff was telling the truth about the Facebook account's privacy settings ultimately doesn't matter. She changed something after being instructed not to. This resulted in posts being hidden from public view. According to the court, this flip of a digital switch was a violation of the order to preserve evidence.

By altering her Facebook account, Thurmond violated the Court's May 21 order. Her conduct had the effect of hiding her postings from public view, and hence from defendants' counsel's view.

There were no sanctions for this action. Just a few stern words from the judge. The damage done was minimal as the defense counsel was still able to obtain the "missing" posts. The plaintiff herself offered to print out the hidden posts in an effort to comply with the order. Of course, this offer came aftershe had altered the privacy settings and the defense counsel had noticed the alteration.

The damage, however, could cost the plaintiff her case, even if the judge isn't going to issue sanctions for violating a preservation order and even though the defense was able to recover the missing posts.

Of course, it does not appear that the postings were deleted, and they remain available for defendants' use, and defendants have not shown that they were prejudiced by Thurmond's conduct in violating the order. Nevertheless, it is troubling that the posts were removed from public view after this Court issued a consent order designed to preserve the status quo of her social media accounts. Also troubling is Thurmond's execution of an affidavit that contained a statement she knew to be inaccurate. Although the false statement was ultimately immaterial to the issues in the pending motions, Thurmond's willingness to sign the affidavit knowing or having reason to know that it included a false statement threatens the integrity of the judicial process. Thurmond's conduct in both respects is certainly a fair subject for cross-examination at trial and could result in the impeachment of her credibility.

As Venkat Balasubramani points out, changing privacy settings on relevant social media accounts during litigation is something to do "at your own peril." In this case, the damage was minimal. At most, the plaintiff undercut her own credibility. That may cost her a positive ruling, but it won't result in anything more serious like jail time.

What is a larger problem are the federalrules for evidence preservation, which include preserving evidence you possibly won't even knowis evidence until you've been indicted. As we've seen in the past, rules meant to prevent corporationsfrom using culpatory documents for bonfire fuel are instead being used by the feds to stack charges against defendants who've done normal computer housecleaning, like culling hard drive clutter or clearing their browser history.

Sarbanes-Oxley says evidence -- which now apparently includes every bit of your digital presencein additionto physical files -- relevant to "foreseeableinvestigations" must be preserved. Since citizens don't initiate investigations, the ball is completely in the government's court, and every investigation seems "foreseeable" once it's underway. Those being investigated may not have seen it coming, but they're still saddled with a post facto requirement to preserve evidence dating back to whatever arbitrary point the government declares to be the beginning of the alleged wrongdoing. Civil litigants may get away with nothing more than some words from an irritated judge, but federal defendants won't be nearly as lucky. Thanks to the misuse of this law, anyone changing privacy settings to a social media account does so "at their own peril."

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