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How social media can negatively affect your car accident case

On Behalf of | Jan 31, 2025 | Car Accidents

As you seek to recover from your car accident, you need an outlet to vent your frustrations and a place to find support. In today’s technological age where people are connected through the internet, social media provides the platform that many car accident victims seek. While social media sites can make it extraordinarily easy to connect with family members, friends and acquaintances, especially when your accident injuries leave you physically unable to meet with these individuals, discussing your wreck and its corresponding injuries on social media can be risky to your personal injury lawsuit. Let’s look at why that is so that you better understand the dangers of positing on social media after your car accident.

How social media can derail your personal injury lawsuit

Posting on social media is easy, which is part of its appeal. But the ease with which you can communicate with others can be problematic. Here’s why:

  • Social media posts can be used to contradict you: As you head into litigation, the defense will do everything they can to try to paint your account of events as unreliable. One way they’ll do that is by seeking out inconsistent statements. Social media posts might give them the ammunition they need to attack you here, especially if you post without much of a filter. And if your credibility is shot, then you might have a hard time convincing a jury that they should side with you in your personal injury case.
  • Social media can minimize your damages: Social media tends to portray the best parts of our lives, and in many instances the facts that are presented through social media posts are exaggerated. But the defense won’t see your posts that way. Instead, they’ll use them to try to highlight how your injuries aren’t as severe as you claim them to be, which can prove problematic in your case when you’re trying to demonstrate the severity of your injuries.
  • Social media can open the door to arguments about pre-existing conditions: If you have a pre-existing condition that you talk freely about on social media, then the defense is going to latch onto that to try to minimize the damages you’ve claimed. They’ll try to go back as far as they can to identify these conditions, too.

Keep in mind that social media can be problematic for your case in more ways than one. While your posts may be damaging to your case, so can check-ins at places that may contradict your claimed injuries, like the gym or yoga classes. Posts on friends’ social media accounts and posts to your pages made by family members and friends can also be used against you in court. So, it’s best to tighten your privacy settings, think twice about posting on social media and scrutinize any new friend requests you receive. Keep in mind that the defense is out there lurking, looking for any mistakes that you make that they can use against you.

Don’t make costly errors that jeopardize your personal injury claim

There are a lot of issues that can affect the direction and outcome of your personal injury case. You need to know how to address each one of them to protect the viability of your claim. Otherwise, you’ll miss the one opportunity you have to secure the financial resources necessary to effectively rebuild your life after your wreck.

We know that navigating the personal injury lawsuit process can be stressful, but it’s not something that you have to face alone. If you need support throughout the process, then think through what you want that support to look like and what you can do to secure it.