Yes, and it does so in ways most people never anticipate. A photo posted three weeks after an accident, a comment left on a friend’s post, a check in at a bar the night of an alleged offense, all of it is discoverable and all of it gets used. The Law Offices of Anthony Carbone handles criminal defense and personal injury matters throughout New Jersey, and the single piece of advice that applies to both is the same: stop posting. Not because you have something to hide, but because context disappears the moment a prosecutor or insurance adjuster reads your account without you there to explain it.
Is your social media actually admissible in court?
Yes. New Jersey courts treat social media content as documentary evidence subject to standard authentication rules under N.J.R.E. 901. In State v. Hannah, 448 N.J. Super. 78 (App. Div. 2016), the Appellate Division held that a Twitter post could be authenticated through circumstantial evidence, including the account handle, the profile photo, and the content’s connection to the parties, without needing testimony from the platform.
Privacy settings do not create a legal shield. A private account is not privileged. Content reaches the other side through subpoenas, through screenshots taken by people on your friends list, and through discovery demands that courts have been willing to enforce where relevance is shown.
How do prosecutors and insurers find it?
Directly and through third parties. Investigators run open source searches on your name and known handles, review tagged photos on other people’s accounts, and pull public posts without any legal process at all.
For non public material, the federal Stored Communications Act, 18 U.S.C. 2701, limits what platforms will hand over in response to a civil subpoena, which is why civil litigants typically seek the content from the account holder in discovery instead. In criminal cases, prosecutors obtain communications content through search warrants supported by probable cause. New Jersey’s Communications Data Warrant procedure is used for stored electronic communications.
Location data is its own category. Geotags, check ins, and the timestamps embedded in photo metadata put you at a place and time more reliably than most witness testimony.
What kinds of posts cause the most damage?
Four patterns come up repeatedly:
- Activity photos in personal injury cases. A plaintiff claiming a back injury who posts a hiking picture will spend a deposition explaining it, regardless of whether they were in pain the whole time or the photo was taken two years earlier.
- Statements about the incident. Explaining your side in a comment thread creates an admission under N.J.R.E. 803(b)(1), which excepts a party’s own statement from the hearsay rule.
- Contact with witnesses or complainants. A message to the other party can violate a no contact condition of release and may support a witness tampering charge under N.J.S.A. 2C:28-5, a third degree crime carrying 3 to 5 years.
- Content that undercuts your character at sentencing. Photos with alcohol, weapons, or cash get introduced when a judge is weighing mitigating factors under N.J.S.A. 2C:44-1(b).
Should you delete your old posts?
No. Deleting content after a case begins is one of the worst available moves. Tampering with or destroying evidence is a fourth degree crime under N.J.S.A. 2C:28-6 when done with the purpose of impairing its availability in a proceeding, and hindering apprehension under N.J.S.A. 2C:29-3 can reach the same conduct.
In civil cases, the spoliation doctrine allows a judge to instruct the jury that it may infer the destroyed evidence was unfavorable to you. New Jersey courts recognize that remedy along with discovery sanctions and, in some circumstances, a separate fraudulent concealment claim.
Deletion also rarely works. Platforms retain data after user deletion, recipients keep screenshots, and archived versions persist. What you gain is nothing. What you create is an argument that you tried to hide something.
The right step is preservation. Once you anticipate litigation, a duty to preserve relevant material attaches. Tell your attorney what exists and let them handle it.
What should you do while your case is pending?
Set accounts to private, accept no new connection requests, and stop posting about anything related to your life circumstances, your injuries, your whereabouts, or your case. Ask family and close friends not to tag you or post photos of you. Turn off location services for social apps.
Say nothing about the case in direct messages either. Messages are not privileged. Only the attorney client communication is protected, under N.J.R.E. 504.
Social media can also work in your favor. A timestamped post, a check in at a different location, or a conversation thread can support an alibi or contradict the other side’s timeline. That evidence needs to be preserved properly and introduced through counsel rather than posted defensively in public.
Where The Law Offices of Anthony Carbone fits in
An attorney can send preservation letters for the accounts and footage that support your version, evaluate what the other side is likely to obtain, and prepare you for the questions your own history will generate. Doing that early matters, because platform data and third party video are frequently overwritten on cycles measured in weeks.
The safest approach during an open case is to treat every post as though it will be read aloud in a courtroom, because it might be. If you are facing charges or pursuing a claim in New Jersey and are unsure what your accounts might do to your case, The Law Offices of Anthony Carbone can review what is out there and tell you how to handle it without creating a second problem.