Facebook has more than 500 million registered users; Twitter’s175 million members collectively post over 90 million tweets per day; mobile phone users spend approximately 3.1 hours per week on social network sites; and in total, American users spend almost 25 percent of their online time on social networking sites and blogs.
Recognizing the new trends in online behavior, lawyers soon realized that social network sites were an untapped repository of potentially discoverable information that could be used for impeachment purposes against parties and witnesses. Such data might include profile information, photos and videos, and comments and status updates concerning a user’s thoughts, activities and intentions. However, legal and ethical rules place certain limits as to how far attorneys may go to obtain such information, some of which is only available to social network “friends” allowed access by the user.
