Dangers of Social Media: Watch what you post, tweet, or blog about!

Nowadays, everyone has a website, blog or account with social media sites like Twitter, Facebook or Myspace. The great thing about those resources is the ability for a person to immediately voice their opinions or keep others up to date about what you are doing. The bad thing is that people tend to publish on social media without considering the legal ramifications of their social network activities.

Comments and information that you publish online can be discovered in a subsequent litigation (assuming of course the information sought is discoverable/relevant pursuant to civil litigation rules).

For example, a resident of Escondido who submits a worker's compensation claim for disability, who later tweets about going hiking on Cowels Mountain in Mission Trails during the supposed period of disability, probably just created great evidence to fight his or her claim.

That same person might also blog about his experience and later realize that his blog post about his hiking trip contradicts his claim for disability. He or she might then try to delete the post. Be aware there are websites that crawl the internet and archive snapshots of other websites for archiving purposes. So just because you modified your webpage to remove information that you later realized should not be published, does not mean that there aren't other ways to reaquire that information.

One general rule of thumb is to stop before you publish, and ask yourself: "Is this something that I may not want someone to see in the future?" If the answer is yes, then you may not want to publish it.

The dangers of using social media also extend to businesses. A business must be careful not to unwittingly create liability for itself using social media. A business that uses social media to correspond with potential clients could unwittingly cause the potential client to believe he is an actual client, or that a comment made informally in a tweet is a "guarantee." To address issues like this, businesses should review their on-line presence from a risk management perspective. For example, an attorney can help you determine whether something like a Terms & Conditions or Disclaimer (see the blog post on this topic by clicking here) should be used, and how.