It has become one of the most important questions of our time, at least in terms of divorce law: is social media a helpful tool or an alluring menace? The question could be posed more generally to society as a whole, but with divorce, it is an especially important query. Social media can absolutely ruin a person’s divorce case, and it could even impact your life after a divorce agreement has been finalized.
Facebook and Twitter, and their social media peers, have created an intricate web of connections that make it very easy for people to know exactly what you are doing, when you are doing it, and why. Going out to a happy hour? Blink and you’ll miss that your friends checked you in at the bar on Facebook and tagged you in the status. Leaving town for the weekend? Your son or daughter may have already tweeted their friends about it before you’ve even left.
In a vacuum, these moments are not problematic. But in the context of a divorce, and with many statuses building up over time, these moments can catch a lying husband or wife in their tracks. The ease of use of most social media sites doesn’t even make such an investigation that hard. You could do it on your own with a few dedicated hours.
All of this is to say that if you are going through a divorce or if you have complex agreements regarding child custody or spousal support, you need to think twice about posting something online that has to do with your past marriage and current divorce.
Source: Huffington Post, “Should I Be Using Social Networking Sites During My Divorce (or Should I Just Shoot Myself in the Foot)?,” Daniel Clement, March 5, 2014