Digging for the Digital Dirt: Discovery and Use of Evidence from Social Media Sites
John G. Browning · SMU Science and Technology Law Review · 2011
The Internet has opened new channels of communication and self-expression .... Countless individuals use message boards, date matching sites, interactive social networks, blog hosting services, and video sharing websites to make themselves and their ideas visible to the world.While such intermediaries enable the user-driven digital age, they also create new legal problems."-Fair Housing Council of San Fernando Valley v. Roommates.com,LLC 489 F.3d 921, 924 (9th Cir.2007).Roughly half of Internet users in the United States have a profile on a social John G. Browning is the managing partner of the Dallas office of Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith LLP, where he handles a wide variety of civil litigation, including cyberliability and technology-related legal issues.He received his B.A. with general and departmental honors from Rutgers University in 1986 and his J.D. from the University of Texas School of Law in 1989.He is the author of The Lawyer's Guide to Social Networking: Understanding Social Media's Impact on the Law (West 2010).networking site.,According to a recent Nielsen survey, individuals devote 22.7% of their online time to social networking.2Not only does this reflect an increase of 43% over the previous year, it also shows that social networking usage is growing more rapidly than any other online activity.3Facebook, founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg as a way for Harvard University students to stay in touch, now boasts 600 million users.4 Roughly half of all Facebook users visit the site at least once a day.5 In March 2010, Facebook surpassed Google as the most-visited website in the world.6In December 2010 alone, Americans spent 49.3 billion minutes on Facebook.7The social networking/micro-blogging site Twitter-which allows its users to "tweet" updates of up to 140 characters directly from their cell phones and other wireless devices-was founded in 2006.8Lured by such immediacy and simplicity, Twitter's ranks quickly swelled to 190 million users.9The site went from handling 20,000 tweets a day in 2007 to a staggering 65 million a day by 2010.10Even a site that bills itself as more professional and business-oriented, Linkedln, has over 90 million members." 1.The Infinite Dial 2010: Digital Platforms and the Future of Radio, EDISON RES.& AR3ITRON, (Apr.8, 2010),