How Social Media affects Personal Injury Claims

The popularity and widespread use of social media is vastly increasing in today’s world and it is common to share personal information across many different social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. The volume of personal information that is floating in cyberspace is amazing or alarming, depending on your perspective.

Social media has not only affected the way we interact and connect with our friends and family, but it has also influenced the way insurance companies approach personal injury cases. If you have recently filed a personal injury claim, you may want to evaluate your use of social media and how it could possibly impact your case.

Insurance companies are using social media as an investigative tool to obtain evidence against the injured party in court. If sufficient evidence is pulled from social media demonstrating that a plaintiff’s injuries may be fraudulent or even placed in doubt, then the courts are more likely to rule in the favor of the insurance company.

How Insurance Companies Are Using Social Media Posts Against You In Court

Plaintiffs may seek compensation for injuries sustained in motor vehicle collisions, slip and fall accidents, medical malpractice and other types of accidents.  Given that insurance companies are in the business to make a profit, they expend a certain amount of their resources investigating and attempting to block claims that they suspect are fraudulent as well as those for which they find any grounds to deny.  Insurance companies hire private investigators to perform surveillance and also to investigate medical records and other background information on claimants, particularly before they pay out substantial claims.

In some ways, social media has made it easier for insurers to conduct their investigation and determine whether to approve or deny a claim. When an insurance adjuster is suspicious of an individual’s personal injury claim, he or she is likely to conduct a Facebook search for the injured person’s profile. They can use photos, wall posts and videos pulled from your Facebook or other social media accounts against you in court, if the content of your pictures or posts implies that your claim of injury is false. For example, if someone reports to their insurance company that they are badly injured and unable to walk, yet there are photos of them participating in a sport or another activity that wouldn’t be possible if the injuries were genuine, then these pieces of evidence can be used in court against your case. Even seemingly innocent comments such as a post that you "feel fine" or "am getting better" can be used to disprove the magnitude of your pain and injury. This is the kind of evidence that insurance companies are looking for.

On May 7, 2015, the National Post reported that a B.C. Supreme Court judge denied a woman's substantial personal injury claim on the basis of her credibility. The woman claimed that she entered into a state of depression after a car accident. She testified that her only friends were on the internet and that she led an unhappy life. The defence used hours of video surveillance footage against her in court along with 194 pages from her Facebook account. The Facebook posts showed that the woman participated in many social activities such as costume parties, river tubing with friends, drinking, and karaoke competitions. This case serves as an example of how social media posts can be used against you in court.

What Should You Do

There are a few measures that you can take to prevent social media being used to the detriment of your case.

• Think before you post. If you have a pending personal injury case, be careful about the information you share on social media. Don’t share anything you might regret later. This is a good rule to follow even if you have no personal injury claims pending.
• Make your Facebook page private. Be sure that your information is only shared with a close circle of friends and family who you know and trust. Don’t accept friend requests from people you don’t know.
• Be honest about your injuries. The easiest way to prevent you from getting nailed for inconsistencies in your claims is to tell the truth about your injuries.

We live in a rapidly changing world and in no way is this more apparent than in the way that social media and the internet have affected our lives.  Social media has hugely increased our access to information and connectivity to others, but what has evolved more slowly, is the setting of boundaries and security around the information that is updated.  As a general rule, it is not a good idea to update or post personal information that we do not want to be viewed by everyone or misconstrued to reflect poorly on us.