Tuesday, January 3, 2012

UK study reveals 33% of divorce petitions cite Facebook as a problem

In a study conducted by Divorce Online in the United Kingdom, 33% of divorce petitions filed in 2011 used Facebook posts as evidence of behavior that led to the breakup (up from 20% in 2009).

There were three main reasons that Facebook was mentioned:

  1. Inappropriate messages to members of the opposite sex. 
  2. Separated spouses posting nasty comments about each other. 
  3. Facebook friends reporting spouse’s behavior.
I'm sure that we have all seen our Facebook friends posting horrible things about their spouses, but I'm also sure that few of them expect those posts to end up appearing in legal documents.

Courts are still struggling with how to deal with social media discovery in civil cases. Some courts require the parties to "friend" each other. Understanding that privacy settings may restrict what can be viewed, others have ordered disclosure of login information. However, both of these options may lead to disclosure of information that is irrelevant and not subject to discovery. Some courts have conducted in camera review of the parties' accounts. Offenback v. L.M. Bowman, Inc., 2011 WL 2491371 (M.D. Pa. 2011); Barnes v. CUS Nashville, Inc., 2010 WL 2265668 (M.D. Tenn. 2010). With the addition of Facebook's download feature, we may see that option become the predominant method in the near future.

1 comments:

  1. Social media sites encourage people to share their lives with people all over the world. Sometimes though, we share too much.

    ReplyDelete